by Ben Brooks
Possible spoilers. There were times I thought this book was going to devolve into chick lit territory — intelligent young woman in abusive relationship! bambina ex macchina! precocious little kid! uncompelling characters, bad choices… but it really didn’t end up there. The abusive relationship is abruptly ended in a glorious bit of turn-around. The bambina ex macchina isn’t so precocious you want to wring her little neck. The bad choices are shown to be for not-always-bad reasons in the end.
I honestly did love these characters, starting with Yara, the wife. I loved that she was deeply flawed. I loved her dimwitted second husband who proved himself to be “more than” what everyone saw, as Yara put it. I loved drughead Emil. Arthur, the driver of the plot, with his blow-on-the-head epiphany, was harder to love; because we got no picture of who he really was before the accident, and no sense of how his life change was really due to ‘brain damage’, literally or not. Evangeline, the daughter, is maybe last on my list of appreciation, due to her choices, but she was not a character I disliked overall, and I think she made good in the end. But one quibble with the writing was that it was hard to reconcile college-age Evangeline with the high school girl of just pages earlier. I’d say she’s the character I really had the most trouble with.
Tytania 