Leah Hager Cohen

Wow. This book snuck up on me. It seemed like an ordinary love story but became so much more. I had to re-read the ending the morning after I'd finished it just to be sure Esker did what she did.

Ann James is a teenager who has broken both her heels in a disturbing way. She is being tutored at home by her favourite teacher, Esker. Ann's parents are long separated, but still married. Her father, Wally and Esker fall in love. The private school were Esker works threatens to fire her for an inapproiate relationship with a married parent, and Esker must make a decision. Sounds like a beach read...chick lit, right? But it isn't. It's deeper.

The reviewer who posted before me wrote that she thought "Esker, might grow and chose to be a different person. She might step outside her comfort zone and chose to be happy and live life. But does she?" I say that's exactly what she did. She left her ghosts behind, and the safe job and home she'd known ever since graduation. She is becoming a new person, but not without a cost to herself and others.… (més)

My book club and I were pretty much in unison on this one: so much ado about ... what? The author seems to be working her way through a checklist of "contemporary fiction to-dos" ... eccentric family, prodigal son, dark family secret = check! Gender fluid characters, interracial romance, environmental activism, free range parenting = check! "Ripped from the headlines" subplot (a religious group poised to transform an established old town - will the community welcome them or close ranks?) = check! Whimsical ancestral home, precocious kid, and a bit with an animal = check! ... without bothering to connect these disparate narrative elements into any kind of cohesive whole.

The result is a story that has a lot going on but not much happening ... which can be okay if the author creates characters that you're vested in, but that doesn't happen here either because Cohen seems to believe that endowing characters with imaginative idiosyncrasies - a husband who loves baking, a wife who grooves on being fertile, a daughter who's into avant garde theater, a little kid who fancies himself a military scout - is enough to make them fully realized and endearing, but of course it's not. And maybe it's just me, but authors who employ third person limited narration shouldn't endow their characters with anachronistic perspectives and vocab just so the author can show off their wit and wokeness. Totally undermines any authenticity the author is attempting to establish.

I hung in there until the end because I kept thinking that something must be coming - some revelation or narrative twist that would tie all these meandering subplots together - but that never happens and now I kind of regret the time I spent on this, time I could have spent on something with more authenticity, depth, and genuine empathy.… (més)