By Jojo Moyes

She steps forward and makes to touch Nisha’s arm. Nisha immediately snaps it away. She does not like to be touched at the best of times, least of all by someone showing visible sympathy.

Nisha nods, dumbly. Jasmine stops and reaches into her bag. Nisha stares at her. She does not want to take money from this woman, with her catalog-quality jacket and cheap trainers. She does not want to think of herself as poorer than this.

Sam knows that if she stays at home she will either have to sit with Phil in the dead-aired, enervating living room, or start one of the 148 tasks that need doing in the house that everyone else seems to believe are her responsibility. If she does this, she will be seething, her rage barely suppressed, within minutes. And then she will hate herself for it, because depression is no one’s fault.

I’ve been curious to read a “#1 New York Times best-selling author of Me Before You Jojo Moyes,” novel as her women’s fiction is so popular and lauded. But none of the descriptions of her books appealed to me until this one, In Someone Else’s Shoes. Certainly not Me Before You where the hero (spoiler alert LOL) commits suicide in the end. Nope, not for me. Anyway, This one seemed right up my alley.

The book concerns two women whose personalities and lives are as different as night and day but whose fates collide when their two gym bags are exchanged by accident. Nisha, an American, has lived a life of wealth and privilege married to Carl for the last 18 years. It all comes to an abrupt halt on the day she loses her gym bag containing her custom-made Christian Louboutin shoes. On that same day, she suddenly learns her husband is divorcing her. He has ruthlessly locked her out of her penthouse, cut off her credit cards, and basically leaves her to fend for herself on the streets of London with no money, friends, or any other resources other than her wits. The Louboutin shoes are now in the hands of Sam, a low-level account manager for a marketing firm. She is basically a willing drudge and doormat whose boss bullies her unmercifully. Her husband Phil suffers from clinical depression brought on by the death of his father and subsequent job loss. He is totally useless and I unsympathetically hated him almost to the end. Sorry. These are two very unhappy women. And no, neither one of them is very likable at the beginning of their stories. But I’m used to reading about the hard journeys of women who start out as one thing and end up as another. And I had read enough about this book to know they both triumph in the end, become better people and all of their enemies get their comeuppances. But boy, those journeys were hard indeed. Even though it is funny and fascinating and we eventually can’t help but root for them, there was very little light to be had at the end of the tunnel. At times, there wasn’t even a tunnel. But friends (a new concept for Nisha) start appearing and much of the joy and reward of this book comes when the two women and their loyal entourages meet and start to work together to get Nisha her “settlement” and reunite her with her beloved but fragile son stuck in a boarding school in New York. Their mission strangely rests on those red Christian Louboutins. Of course, along the way, Sam also finds her power (sometimes in spite of herself, frustratingly). Will justice be had as well?

It would have been fine with me if some of the sufferings, which got to be a little old and repetitive, would have been cut down a bit. And yes there is at least one big and baffling lapse in the plot. But I can’t be too hard on Nisha for forgetting about that certain something when I forgot about it right with her. And I’m glad Sam was happy at the end but I don’t think I could have gotten over such struggles so quickly. I thought I was looking at a 4-star book all things considered (No surprise, it is very well written). Until the end. The resolution was so twisty, so clever, so satisfying, so complete, and so intricately and perfectly done that I have to give the book 5 stars. I was also moved to tears at Nisha’s reunion with her son. I will take another look at some of Moyes’s books because of this one. Not Me Before You though. No Way.