Now that her kids have started college, Eliza's main occupation is maintaining the online Hudson Valley Ladies' Bulletin Board, which thankfully means that the increasingly agoraphobic woman doesn't have to leave her house very often. But it's on one of these rare trips to the store that she hears about a younger, hipper competing online community that seems to be growing while the Bulletin Board remains stagnant. To drum up some more activity, Eliza creates an anonymous post from a woman who's concerned that the man with whom she was having an affair has followed her to town and won't leave her alone. While the post definitely whips the Bulletin Board into a commenting frenzy, it also causes more than one woman to fret that it's her husband involved in the affair. The remainder of the novel focuses on Eliza trying to clean up her mess, while other women in the community try to suss out the truth of their own relationships.
I really wanted to like this book, but there were just too many plots to make sense of. Eliza's agoraphobia; younger mom Olivia's concerns about her husband's fidelity; another young mom Alison's confusion about her baby's father and a new man in her life; dad Jackie masquerading as a woman to get some advice from the Bulletin Board in regard to his teenage daughter; Eliza's best friend Amanda (inexplicably called Mandy randomly) dealing with her Weinstein-esque husband as he's caught in a #metoo situation — all of these plots, without anything denoting what the main plots are, make it pretty confusing at times, and definitely hard to really get to know any of the characters. And it all wraps up a little too neatly at the end. It wasn't bad, just wasn't the book I thought it could be.
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