Nicole is married with two children and has a very complex relationship with her life. Upon news that her father is dying from a rare disease, she begins to split her time between her home in southern California and weekends in San Francisco where her father and now-caretaker step-mother live. While in San Francisco, she meets the too-good-to-be-true Elijah, a gorgeous sex adonis who anticipates her needs and says all the right things (only highlighting the failings of Nicole's husband). Nicole begins to feel herself caught between two lives: the one where she is unhappily married with no career and a dying father, and the other, where she can pretend to be single, childfree and in love with Elijah.

I was riveted by the first 80% or so of this book. I appreciated the raw and real challenges of modern motherhood [without feeling as heavy or enraging as so many books I've read on the subject in recent years like <i>Nightbitch, Liars, </i>or <i>Soldier Sailor</i> (though all books I liked)]. Also, as someone who lost my father very quickly from cancer two years ago, the representation of her father's decline, the strain on her step-mother as caretaker, and the whole experience of hospice and anticipatory grief was spot on, almost to an eerie degree.

But the last 20% or so of this book left me thinking this book didn't really know what kind of book it wanted to be. It was as if the desire to have a twist so unexpected outweighed the need for logic. As a result, the ending adversely impacted my perception of the book as a whole and left me wishing the book had done more to integrate the very interesting topics it was exploring before jumping the shark.

The audiobook was well done and the direction of the twist was handled in a very interesting way. Nicole's narrative was especially engaging in no small part to the narrator who did her voice.

Thank you to Brilliance Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC. Opinions are my own.

I put this on before I went to bed and ended up listening to the entire thing in one go. RIP bedtime. As soon as the story started, I was entrapped and powerless to do anything but finish Woman on the Verge in one sitting! Spoiler alert, Dear Reader. It was absolutely worth it. Narrated by a quartet of narrators I've not come across before, I would not hesitate to put Dana Green, Abigail Reno, Jordan Claire McCraw, and Amanda Stribling on my list of auto-listen audiobook narrators.

The audiobook was smoothly edited with no phrase repeats or noticeable errors, and it was an immersive read with well-chosen narrators for the clarity of their voices when listening and their ability to bring the characters to life. It was a joy to listen to, and I know I'll think about the story often.

Thank you to Brilliance Publishing, Brilliance Audio, Kim Hooper and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ALC; it's available now!