Karolina Waclawiak

This was our script, and it soon spiraled into familiar territory, which ended in his sleeping on the couch and my staring at the ceiling alone in our bedroom. My first instinct was usually to fix, to make him happy, to take it back, and also to berate myself quietly for being a broken person who could not be a productive part of a unit. But this time I didn't do any of those things.

Evelyn is newly unemployed and her marriage is dying. She spends her free time on-line, reading articles and message boards about grief. She also trains to be a grief counselor, helping people and their loved ones through assisted suicide. She's not sure why she feels compelled to pre-grieve when she's never had a family member die. As she drives around greater Los Angeles, learning to help people die and remembering events from her marriage and her childhood, she feels like she's just drifting, but really she's moving forward.

This is a thoughtful, quiet novel that seems to be spinning its wheels for much of the novel, until all the pieces fall into place. Evelyn seems like she's going to start careening from disaster to disaster, when what's happening is that she's figuring out how to live. This novel snuck up on me, taking its time before pulling me entirely into Evelyn's world.… (altro)

While reading this novel I realized that the adjectives book reviewers use don't make a lot of sense. If you were to enjoy reading The Invaders, for example, you might call it "tight," as a complement, as in "a tight novel about the unraveling lives of a country-club-set woman and her stepson." If you thought it was too "tight" though you might call it "thin" which is a word not related semantically to "tight" except in the world of book reviews, where if you squeeze a story too tightly it gets thin.

I wavered as I read between "tight" and "thin" as I read this novel and ended up thinking "thin". While I appreciated the tight lens and the linear drive of the story, in the end there just wasn't enough meat for me to care about the characters. A big disadvantage to the author is that the setting she chose was Cheever territory and she writes without any of the mordant charm or startling juxtapositions or humanity of Cheever--just the drinking and the pool parties and the adultery and the shallowness of people living with too much money and too little imagination.

My other complaint is that the bones of plot were way too exposed, where the crisis points felt manufactured and unrealistic rather than organic to the characters or their story.

All that said, I read to the end. It held my interest that much in spite of these judgmental feelings and I'll probably give the author another try. It feels like a first novel even though it isn't.… (altro)