Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

 This book is getting a lot of hype and I'm not totally sure why. Margaret was abandoned as a baby and grew up in an orphanage. She thinks marriage is the ticket to happiness even though she has nothing on which to base what a good marriage should look like. She meets Felix and when he asks to marry her, she says yes. But she doesn't know that Felix is gay and is also viewing marriage and family as the key to his survival. The other main couple in the book are Cal and Becky. He was born with one leg shorter than the other, so was ineligible to serve in WW2, which makes him feel like less of a man. Becky is a seer, who can communicate with the dead. Cal is not a big fan of the steady stream of people in their house trying to communicate with dead loved ones, which causes strain in their marriage. 

Felix goes off to war. Both he and Margaret stray while he is away, which has profound consequences for their already shaky marriage. To this point, the only character I really liked was Lydia, the woman who ran the orphanage where Margaret grew up. By the end of the book, Felix was kind of growing on me. But it took 400 pages of story for me to feel that way. 

I would be interested to hear what other readers thought of this book, especially why they liked it.