Michael Magras

FictionPopular Fiction

The Farm

Review by Michael Magras

There are a number of compelling arguments for surrogacy. Some would-be mothers are unable to conceive. Gay couples may wish to become parents. But, as with any legal arrangement, complications can arise, especially when mercenaries try to exploit people’s emotions for monetary gain.

Joanne Ramos imagines such complications in The Farm, her ambitious dystopian debut. The novel’s effectiveness lies in the power of its premise. Financially straitened women, most of them Filipina immigrants—Ramos, an American, was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was 6—are recruited to carry the babies of an ultra-rich, typically white clientele in exchange for a huge payout.

Among the immigrants is protagonist Jane Reyes, the Filipina mother of a 4-year-old girl who left her husband after she discovered his affair. After Jane loses her nanny job, she takes a tip from her 67-year-old cousin with whom she lives, and applies for a job at Golden Oaks, a fancy resort in New York’s Hudson Valley. At Golden Oaks, surrogate mothers reside in luxury, and this opulence includes organic meals, private fitness trainers, daily massages—all for free. But the pregnant women are constantly monitored, and they are restricted from leaving the grounds or from having any contact with the outside world.

The person running Golden Oaks is Mae Yu, a high-achieving Chinese-American woman who, in a marvelous phrase, has “a lusty Ayn Randian love of New York.” Her job is to recruit Hosts who are willing to carry babies for the company’s wealthy Clients. Not all Hosts, however, are treated the same. A few are Premium Hosts, which means they’re white. They include Jane’s roommate Reagan, who represents the holy trifecta of Premium Hosts because she’s white, pretty and educated. She aspires to a career in photography and wants to break free of her domineering father. Another Premium Host is Lisa, who sees Golden Oaks for what it is and recruits Jane and Reagan in her plans to undermine its authority. And then there’s Jane’s cousin, whose motivations may not be what they seem.

Although The Farm has too many digressions and sometimes makes its points too obviously, Ramos still does an excellent job posing complex questions surrounding surrogacy, immigration, capitalism and more. At one point, Reagan tells Jane, “Everything’s conditional. Everything’s got strings attached.” The Farm shows how intricately laced those strings can be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joanne Ramos for The Farm.

There are a number of compelling arguments for surrogacy. Some would-be mothers are unable to conceive. Gay couples may wish to become parents. But, as with any legal arrangement, complications can arise, especially when mercenaries try to exploit people’s emotions for monetary gain.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Lost and Wanted

Review by Michael Magras

If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts. You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death. 

That’s the premise with which Nell Freudenberger opens her third novel, Lost and Wanted. And what a novel it is, a work about cold, hard science that is also a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.

Charlie and Helen, who met at Harvard during freshman orientation in 1989, came from disparate backgrounds. They were, respectively, “an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena.” Helen became a physicist, wrote two popular books for laypersons about quantum cosmology and black holes, and co-published a celebrated model for “quark gluon plasma as a black hole in curved five-dimensional space-time” with a former boyfriend named Neel Jonnal. 

Charlie, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and became an executive television producer. She had a daughter after marrying a “blindingly attractive” surfer whose brother was in jail for drug possession. But life wasn’t always easy for Charlie. At Harvard, a professor’s advances persuaded her to abandon her thesis on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaisons, and give up her dreams of studying at Oxford. Later, she contracted the lupus that led to her death.

Shortly after Charlie dies, Helen’s 7-year-old son, Jack, whom she had through an anonymous donor, claims to have seen a ghost in their house. And that’s when the texts start arriving, messages containing information that only Charlie could have known. 

Also arriving in Massachusetts: Charlie’s surfer husband, who plans to live with his in-laws, and Helen’s former boyfriend Neel, who accepts an MIT post to continue groundbreaking work on gravitational waves. 

Refreshingly, the science in Lost and Wanted is never window dressing, as the technical concepts that Freudenberger describes at length are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion. It is a magnificent novel.

If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts. You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death. 

Fiction

Landfall

Review by Michael Magras

Long before first lady Laura Bush mentions The Prime Minister, the fifth of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, readers familiar with his sextet of political works will have detected the similarity between them and Landfall, Thomas Mallon’s new book. Instead of Prime Minister Plantaganet Palliser and discussions of the Irish Land Tenant Bill, Mallon gives us the first two years of George W. Bush’s second term and its challenges, self-inflicted and otherwise, from the Iraq War to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

The writing style is the same, however, with a huge cast of characters and long conversations about politics. Amid the real-life personages, Mallon has added two that are fictional: Ross Weatherall, a director of the merged National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, where he is updating a 1938 Works Progress Administration guidebook on New Orleans; and Allison O’Connor, a civilian lawyer whom Donald Rumsfeld brings to D.C. to work at the National Security Council as “an assistant to a special assistant to the president.”

Ross and Allie haven’t seen one another since a romantic evening after a 1978 campaign event in Texas, when Bush unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Decades later, when they reunite, Ross is a committed Bush supporter, while Allie questions the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. Their positions evolve, however, as Katrina and other events force them to recalibrate.

Throughout Landfall, Mallon shifts perspectives among many characters, most notably Condoleezza Rice, portrayed as a relentlessly ambitious person who feels that if Prince Charles “could inherit his one lifelong job, she could be appointed to all of hers.” And he writes many scathing portraits of the era’s figures, including Barbara Bush, who, when she and George H.W. Bush call on dying former Texas governor Ann Richards, wants nothing more than to hurry the visit along.

If Mallon tries too hard to cram in references to every major news story of the day, Landfall is still a well-researched view of the jealousies and back-room dealings of early 21st-century American politics.

Ross and Allie haven’t seen one another since a romantic evening after a 1978 campaign event in Texas, when Bush unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Decades later, when they reunite, Ross is a committed Bush supporter, while Allie questions the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. Their positions evolve, however, as Katrina and other events force them to recalibrate.

FictionDebut Fiction

The Falconer

Review by Michael Magras

You can try, but you’re unlikely to find descriptions of basketball as elegant as those in Dana Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer. “The ball is a face. Leathered and weathered and pockmarked and laugh lined.” So begins the story of Lucy Adler, 17 and confident in her ability to beat any man on the court.

The novel is set in the early 1990s during Lucy’s senior year at Pendleton Academy. Ambitious Lucy likens herself to the Falconer in Central Park, “a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird.” That’s how she wants to live: at the top of her powers and showing no fear. Although she wonders why women don’t get statues like that.

Lucy is in unrequited love with Percy, her frequent competitor on the court, a wealthy kid whose family made its fortune in part by investing in the company that made Agent Orange. She can’t help but notice that she doesn’t get as much as respect as boys like Percy do, even though she’s her school’s scoring leader. That’s just one of the many examples of sexism Lucy confronts, but at least she doesn’t lack people to commiserate with. Among them are older cousin Violet, an artist, and the woman Violet lives with, also an artist, whose latest project involves using Pepto-Bismol to paint Barbie logos.

There’s little plot here, and Czapnik’s characters tend to make speeches, but The Falconer offers astute observations on the difficulties women confront when trying to succeed in male-dominated fields. In Lucy, Czapnik has created a great character who refuses to conform to expectations. But even Lucy knows that, for a falcon to soar, those with the power to hold it back need to let go.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You can try, but you’re unlikely to find descriptions of basketball as elegant as those in Dana Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer. “The ball is a face. Leathered and weathered and pockmarked and laugh lined.” So begins the story of Lucy Adler, 17 and confident in her ability to beat any man on the court.

FictionSatire

Hark

Review by Michael Magras

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

If ever there lived an accidental messiah, it’s Hark Morner. His original goal—in one of Lipsyte’s many sly commentaries—was to be a stand-up comic. He wasn’t all that good, but a club owner booked him to perform his act on “the pitfalls of office life” at corporate gatherings. Hark quickly began to take his own words seriously. He had found his calling.

Hark calls his method “mental archery,” or “a few tricks, or tips, to help people focus,” which include everything from yoga and New Age speak to literal bows and arrows. It’s not long before he attracts adherents, who are feverishly devoted to Hark’s vision. Among them are Fraz Penzig, an unhappily married father of twins who is “rich in nutrients, solid from the gym,” yet perpetually feeling “on the verge of the verge of death”; Kate Rumpler, a young heiress who funds the nascent Harkist institute; and Teal Baker-Cassini, former Fulbright scholar and erstwhile embezzler, who now handles the group’s marketing.

Give the world a popular movement, and mercenaries are sure to follow. That’s what happens here, as social media tycoons and others try to monetize Hark’s movement, leaving the former comic to wonder what sort of joke he has unleashed on the world.

Oddly enough for a novel about the power of focus, Hark sometimes strays from its central story. But Lipsyte lands plenty of jabs at his targets, from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists to the desire for quick fixes to complicated problems.

If acidic satire helps you fend off life’s challenges, then put Hark in your quiver.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

All the Lives We Never Lived

Review by Michael Magras

To learn facts about one’s parents from their younger days can be a sobering experience. But discoveries might be especially painful if the facts concern a mother who abandoned her child. Anuradha Roy explores this dynamic in her perceptive new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived.

In 1992, Myshkin Chand Rozario is in his mid-60s. He still lives in his childhood home in the Indian town of Muntazir, where he works as the superintendent of horticulture, “a glorified gardener,” as he puts it.

Myshkin has received a large envelope from someone in Vancouver. The contents of the package pertain to his mother, Gayatri, which prompts Myshkin to recall the events of his childhood in 1937, when India was still under British rule and his mother yearned for a more fulfilling life. Into this picture come two real-life figures: Walter Spies, a German painter who met Gayatri years earlier, and Beryl de Zoete, an English dancer who horrifies young Myshkin with pronouncements like, “I eat little boys baked in the oven. With extra salt.” Inspired by Spies’ philosophy that “there is music in everything, beauty everywhere,” Gayatri leaves her family for what she hopes will be a more exciting and artistic life.

If the novel goes off on too many tangents, Roy is nonetheless a thoughtful writer who creates beguiling scenes, such as the emergence of women holding candles at nighttime, “a wavering line of fireflies,” as they sing a Muslim mourning chant. All the Lives We Never Lived is an affecting tale of loss, remarriage and rediscovery.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

To learn facts about one’s parents from their younger days can be a sobering experience. But discoveries might be especially painful if the facts concern a mother who abandoned her child. Anuradha Roy explores this dynamic in her perceptive new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Ladder to the Sky

Review by Michael Magras

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

It would spoil the pleasure of reading John Boyne’s latest novel to describe most of its plot points, but let’s just say Yorkshire-born Swift is more determined than your average aspiring writer. He has two dreams: to become a celebrated author, and to have a child. And he’ll steal from anyone, starting with 65-year-old German writer Erich Ackermann, whom Swift meets in 1988 when he’s a young waiter in Berlin.

Soon, Ackermann, a gay man with long-suppressed desires, asks the fulsome Swift to accompany him to literary events around the world. Ackermann also shares details of his past, including his membership in the Hitler Youth and a fateful wartime decision regarding a childhood friend.

Swift betrays Ackermann by using his story as the basis for Two Germans, his debut novel. Boyne then presents scenes, most of them told from the perspectives of other characters, that chronicle the extremes Swift pursues to further his career. No one is safe, including Dash Hardy, an older gay writer Swift accompanies to Gore Vidal’s Italian villa; Swift’s wife, Edith, whose literary career is poised to take off just when Swift’s has stalled; and even Swift’s own teenage son.

Boyne sometimes paints in broad strokes, but he compensates with many wonderful touches. Exchanges between Vidal and Swift are deliciously venomous, and the digs at contemporary publishing are spot-on, as when Swift describes a debut novel he dislikes as, “Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange.”

A Ladder to the Sky is an entertaining, if deeply cynical, portrait of the literary world.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

FictionShort Stories

Your Duck Is My Duck

Review by Michael Magras

Come in contact with enough people, and inadvertently or otherwise, you’re bound to disappoint a few of them. Variations on the theme of disappointment link the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s first collection of new work since 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes. It’s hard to imagine a more graceful depiction of lives filled with quiet desperation. As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers.

And what beautifully drawn characters they are: an artist who accepts an offer from wealthy admirers to paint at their island retreat, only to discover that the island isn’t the paradise it seems; elderly actors from Hollywood’s golden age who gather in New York to grouse about a tell-all memoir written by the “putative grandson” of a famous director; a middle-aged woman who recalls three aunts she knew in her youth and her fraught relationship with her mother; and a recent college graduate who steals $10,000 from his unethical CEO father. This last character is featured in a story that also includes a researcher studying the origins of language and begins with the famously ironic boast—“I have the best words”—from the current White House occupant.

Eisenberg’s ability to dramatize family strife through small details has never been more acute, as when an aunt’s purchase of a baby doll for her niece intensifies the mother’s jealousy. And Eisenberg’s writing is glorious throughout, such as her description of a woman wearing “a little vintage sundress, the color of excellent butter.” A story about a teenager seeking a cure for episodes of confusion feels unfocused, but the other five are among the most astute works of short fiction this year. You may not like all the characters, but the book doesn’t disappoint.

Come in contact with enough people, and inadvertently or otherwise, you’re bound to disappoint a few of them. Variations on the theme of disappointment link the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s first collection of new work since 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes. It’s hard to imagine a more graceful depiction of lives filled with quiet desperation. As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Clockmaker’s Daughter

Review by Michael Magras

One of the enduring staples of fiction is the English country house. They are centerpieces of many novels, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Kate Morton puts one such house at the center of The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

The house, situated on the River Thames, is Birchwood Manor, with staircases that turn at odd angles and “wall panels with clever concealments.” The house also conceals a secret inhabitant: a ghost who once went by the name Lily Millington and who now spies on guests who periodically drop by.

Lily first came to Birchwood in July 1862, when aspiring artist Edward Radcliffe invited fellow anti-establishment types to the house for a summer of painting. He couldn’t have predicted the fateful night to come, a night that featured “[t]wo unexpected guests. Two long-kept secrets. A gunshot in the dark.” That gunshot took the life of Fanny Brown, Edward’s fiancée.

Cut to 2017, when Elodie Winslow is working as an archivist, caring for the former belongings of Victorian banker James Stratton. One day, she discovers a waxed cardboard box containing a document case belonging to Stratton and a sketchbook of Edward’s. Among the drawings is one of Birchwood Manor.

It turns out that the house has relevance to Elodie’s family. What follows is an intricate tale that involves an 8-year-old girl who grows up in Bombay before her English parents abandon her at Birchwood in 1899; a 1920s historian researching the story of Edward Radcliffe; and a present-day journalist in search of a gem known as the Radcliffe Blue.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is overstuffed with incident, but readers who enjoy a symphony of voices and multiple storylines will find much to like here. Morton builds considerable drama as she unveils the secrets behind Fanny’s death, the gem and more. It’s an imaginative tale for fans of historical fiction.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of the enduring staples of fiction is the English country house. They are centerpieces of many novels, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Kate Morton puts one such house at the center of The Clockmaker’s Daughter. The…
FictionComic Fiction

French Exit

Review by Michael Magras

Whatever you do, don’t mess with Frances Price. If you’re a waiter, and the “moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five” who is the protagonist of French Exit enters your restaurant, make sure you’re polite to her, or she just might take out her perfume, spritz the centerpiece and set it on fire.

She has nice qualities, too—she gives money to charities and the homeless—but she’s also likely to leave for a ski holiday in Vail rather than contact the authorities when she discovers that her husband, a ruthless litigator, has died of cardiac arrest.

The tabloid scandal caused by her indifference hasn’t stopped her from living an extravagant Manhattan lifestyle since her husband’s death 20 years ago. But enforced austerity is about to begin. Her financial adviser tells her that the money she inherited has run out. Sell everything that isn’t nailed down, he tells her, and begin again.

When an old friend offers her the use of a Paris apartment, Frances reluctantly accepts. Soon, she’s sailing across the Atlantic with Malcolm, her 32-year-old kleptomaniacal “lugubrious toddler” of a son, and Small Frank, an elderly cat she is convinced houses the spirit of her late husband.

Patrick deWitt has great fun with this premise. He populates the story with such characters as Susan, the fiancée Malcolm leaves behind in New York; Madeleine, a medium who can tell when someone is about to die because they look green; and Madame Reynard, an American widow who befriends the Prices because of her fascination with the tabloid scandal.

If French Exit doesn’t always reach the zany heights it strives for, it’s still an entertaining portrait of people who are obsessed with the looming specter of death and who don’t quite feel part of the time they were born into.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whatever you do, don’t mess with Frances Price. If you’re a waiter, and the “moneyed, striking woman of sixty-five” who is the protagonist of French Exit enters your restaurant, make sure you’re polite to her, or she just might take out her perfume, spritz the centerpiece and set it on fire.

FictionSatire

What fools these mortals be

Review by Michael Magras

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

Life isn’t much better in The Shakespeare Requirement, Schumacher’s entertaining follow-up. Fitger is now the department chair, to the faculty’s dismay. That’s not his only problem: The university has renovated Willard Hall, but only for the Economics department, which now enjoys hot-and-cold water fountains and an espresso bar. English is stuck in the dilapidated lower floors, where Fitger has a “barbarically hot” office with “fossilized apple cores” under his desk and wasps in the windows.

That isn’t indignity enough for Roland Gladwell, the Economics chair. He wants to get rid of the English department entirely, so he convinces Phil Hinckler, dean of the university and Fitger’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, to let him chair a quality-assessment program that he hopes will help achieve his goal.

One of the ways English can survive is by submitting an acceptable Statement of Vision. This, too, poses problems, as the proposed statement eliminates the requirement that all students take a Shakespeare course, a change that infuriates the department’s Shakespeare scholar and becomes a cause célèbre among the student body.

The novel includes many colorful characters, among them Fitger’s assistant, Fran, who’d much rather be an animal behavior consultant, and Angela Vackray, a freshman who gets into trouble with a boy from her Bible study.

Schumacher’s humor can be broad—a centenary celebration is called “One Hundred Years of Payne”—but the book has more laugh-out-loud lines than most novels, and she wields cutting remarks that are as sharp as ever. The Shakespeare Requirement is a bitter delight, perhaps, but a delight nonetheless.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine

Review by Michael Magras

Tolstoy would have approved: In the short story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang) finds an impressively wide-ranging assortment of punishments to make 10 different families uniquely unhappy. Yet it’s a thrill to read these stories, proving yet again that even bleak material can be exciting in the hands of a great storyteller.

A summary of the tales in this collection might make you think the book is depressing overall. “A Visit” features an adult daughter returning to her childhood home after an intruder assaults her 82-year-old mother. In “A Signal to the Faithful,” an altar boy faints during church services. A couple’s 8-month-old son disappears in “The Lost Baby.” And in the book’s grisliest and best story, “Wildfire Johnny,” a man finds an ivory-handled razor that allows him to travel 24 hours back in time whenever he uses it to cut his own throat.

Children fare especially poorly in these often-macabre tales, all of them set in and around Tennessee. Among the suffering children are the siblings in “Scroll Through the Weapons” who live in squalor and whose mother has been arrested for stabbing her husband with a kebab skewer.

What makes Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine moving rather than lurid is Wilson’s compassion for his characters and his beautiful writing. He has a gift for heartbreaking detail, as when he mentions a box marked “Winter Coats” that contains the possessions of a grieving mother’s dead child. Despite the bleakness of these stories, there are glimmers of hope, or at least determination, as when one character says he’ll do what he can to “protect us from anything that tried to convince us that we would not live forever in happiness.” It’s a wise sentiment from a nuanced book.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tolstoy would have approved: In the short story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang) finds an impressively wide-ranging assortment of punishments to make 10 different families uniquely unhappy. Yet it’s a thrill to read these stories, proving yet again that even bleak material can be exciting in the hands of a great storyteller.

FictionPopular Fiction

Clock Dance

Review by Michael Magras

Deceptively simple prose is like a child with an adorable smile: They can both get away with a lot. In a career that began with 1964’s If Morning Ever Comes, Anne Tyler has created one deceptively simple novel after another. Her specialty is the depiction of quiet lives that may seem ordinary at first glance. Upon closer inspection, each book is a subtle analysis of American married life, its joys as well as its darker elements.

Tyler offers yet another astute portrait in Clock Dance. In 1967 Pennsylvania, 11-year-old Willa is the elder daughter of a mild-mannered father and a mother prone to disappearances and bursts of violence. The action then shifts to 1977, when college junior Willa flies home so that her boyfriend, Derek, can meet her parents. After a section set in 1997, in which Derek, now her husband, dies in a car accident, the second half of the book shifts to 2017. Willa is living in Arizona and married to retired lawyer Peter. One day, she gets a call from a stranger in Baltimore, who tells her that Denise, a former girlfriend of her elder son, has been shot in the leg. The woman, Denise’s neighbor, asks Willa to fly out to care for the victim’s 9-year-old daughter, Cheryl, whom the neighbor mistakenly thinks is Willa’s granddaughter.

Tyler fans won’t be surprised to learn that kind-hearted Willa agrees to the request. Her experiences with Denise and Cheryl make up much of the book’s drama. If the concluding pages are more circuitous than necessary, Tyler’s touch is as light and sure as ever. Clock Dance is a tender portrait of everyday people dealing with loss and regret, the need to feel useful and the desire for independence.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A heartwarming tale of found family

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