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[divorce-fiction]

The Forgetting by Hannah Beckerman

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 0

The Forgetting feels like an odd book, when you first pick it up. The story is set in England, so I found myself, as an American reader, googling things like 'lorry' (semi-truck) and making sure that yes, they do indeed spell "curb" as "kerb". There's also the distinct choice of writing one protagonist in First Person POV and the other in Third, but this wasn’t the first time I'd encountered a book with this writing choice, so I rolled on. Some chapters are so short that they feel unnecessary, to the point of quite literally being the front and back of a page. Even when we were down to the final confrontation between one woman and her husband there were still so-called chapter breaks interrupting this linear conversation in a park.

Livvy is a new mom on her LEGALLY MANDATED YEAR OF MATERNITY LEAVE (screaming that part loudly for the Americans to have their minds blown). Her husband, Dominic, is a freelance contractor whose current schedule only allows him home on the weekends. She's eager to get back to work and has good relationships with her sister and parents, who all live in Bristol close to her.

Anna is an amnesiac. She has just woken up in a London hospital with no memory of her life and especially no memory of Stephen, who introduces himself as her husband of 12 years and has to leave town on weekends for work. Over the course of the story and her recovery you learn she has no family (only child, her parents died), no friends (withdrew from social life after losing her job), and no children (she and Stephen were infertile).

Or.....wait no that's not true, because she finds pictures of her with a baby. Stephen lied, to protect her! And oh wait, she didn't lose her job as a librarian because of budget cuts, she left it after being depressed by the loss of the baby.

As for Dominic, you get the early sense that he's too good to be true: a gentleman who stepped up to the plate after an accidental pregnancy and has nothing but love in his heart for his new family, an adult replacement for the family he says abused him in childhood.

I won’t bury the lede: This is a slowburn domestic abuse story. Nothing feels too abnormal, too outside the bounds of common marital strife. Yes, couples sometimes lie to each other. Yes, couples can have different ideas of what their perfect family looks like. Yes, couples can have arguments that get heated. But it's the slow creep of toxicity that gives this story its tension. You ask yourself if YOU are susceptible to the same things Anna and Livvy begin to resign themselves to living with: lies and manipulation and browbeating and negging and isolation and, eventually, physical violence. This is a horror novel where you're screaming at the women to get out of there, RUN! But the boogeyman isn't under their bed-- he's in it.

The small details pileup overtime like grains of sand in an hourglass: white flowers, special nicknames, platinum wedding rings, short hair, classical music (Schubert, The Trout Quintet). It's not an instantaneous reveal but a slow peel, the revelation that Stephen and Dominic are the same man. His work trips align so that he can be in Bristol for the weekend with his wife and child, and London during the week with his other wife. He even has Livvy's love letters hidden in a box in the attic. A bigamist, that most foul of liars.

It is not a peel but a cacophonous crash, to discover Anna and Livvy are also the same woman.

Livvy's third-person chapters are told concurrently, but all happened in the past. Anna's first-person chapters are the present and tainted with the garbage heap of lies her husband has fed her since the car accident, a road rage incident that he caused. It's smart, a twist I've seen before, but can't say I saw coming. Bravo, Beckerman. There is a bit of nonsense about middle names as first names, relayed clumsily in the prologue to explain the Anna/Livvy, Dominic/Stephen switch, but I can see why the explanation was built in to undercut any discussion of "plotholes".

This book clocks in at over 300 pages, and there's definitely some points where the pacing could have been picked up and moved things along faster. Chop 50 pages out of it and you’d have a much tighter story.

I enjoyed reading this, but won’t be picking up any of her other works. The novel lived up to its name and I forgot about it immediately after reading. There’s also the matter of JK Rowling's transphobia running rampant in the UK, and I find it hard to trust English artists who have made no definitive statements about trans rights. I recommend picking this one up at a library if you can, and if you can forgive me for spoiling the book’s twist.

Livvy/Anna gets a restraining order against Dominic/Stephen, with the implication that she will be filing for divorce soon after.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 1 Divorces: 0 (technically) Restraining Orders: 1

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

[divorce-fiction]

A Fire So Wild by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 1

If I had a nickel for every piece of media I’ve consumed that had an snooty Jewish mother named Naomi in it I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. ((all my love to 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend'))

Climate Fiction's newest entrant, A Fire So Wild, has its heart in the right place and its words in all the wrong ones. The few positives (evocative descriptions, diverse characters, normalized queerness) do little salvage a story that feels like it was meant to be a shared universe anthology. The few characters whose endings seem hopeful are still saturated with despair, and the book's message is unfortunately, inevitably "There is no light at the end of these tunnels".

There’s a noticeable awkwardness to Ruiz-Grossman’s style of writing. Her sentence structures and noun usage is repetitive. Cliches are dropped almost like placeholders into otherwise well-crafted scenes (“As Xavier walked off, his jeans hugged his legs in all the right places.”). An attempt at building tension draws a reader's gaze to the cast's empty gas tank, but her foreshadowing is clumsy and thus overly obvious. It's a bumpy drive on a beautiful road with unavoidable potholes.

The main characters, defined here as anyone (8!) with a POV, suffer from a lack of time. Each character gets the in media res scene, the sad backstory, and then they fade into the ensemble until the big event (the fire!) which inspires their lifestyle change. It’s a tiring setup with a generic payoff for every single character. Those 8 include: Mar (high school senior) and both of her parents, Camila and Gabriel, Xavier (high school senior) and his moms, Abigail and Taylor, and Sunny and his wife, Willow.

The characters are incredibly diverse, a obvious plus! But the mixed-race lesbians, cross-cultural South Americans, indigenous alt-girl, homeless Asian man, and more suffer from the leftist writer curse of tokenism. The nonbinary shelter volunteer isn't a character, but a flat plot device who feels kept around for the sole purpose of having they/them pronouns checked off the Marginalized Communities list. I want so badly to read about these people and their inner worlds, but they need to be more than cardboard cutouts to tape labels and trauma to.

Speaking of trauma: Willow. A runaway who's all grownup, living in a van with her husband Sunny and their dog Aso, she is the severely depressed girl with PTSD and nothing more. Her sections are only ever about how her trauma was bad and that makes her life bad. And I really do feel for this character! She went through a harrowing sexual assault at the hands of her stepfather and was never given the resources to properly recover from it. But……..she’s also been with her husband for over a decade, since they were teenagers, and has never once told him about it. The guy she refers to multiple times as her reason for living. There's a shallowness to her that renders the whole character irritating. What does she want? What does she believe in? What else does she remember from her life? Trauma does terrible things to a person and it affects everyone differently, but Willow is JUST her trauma.

There’s also a section that jumps very quickly from Willow running through a forest fire (and thinking about her trauma) to Mar hooking up with Xavier. It’s tonal whiplash hell as both events are described with the SAME LANGUAGE, specifically noting how Mar enjoys being “smothered” by her hot boyfriend as opposed to Willow being “smothered” by her rapist. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, maybe the author is trying to draw some kind of parallel. But it was gross when it didn't need to be.

Willow dies in the forest fire, by the way. She lays down, thinks about how traumatized she is, and lets herself burn alive. There is no catharsis here, the most crucial part of a tragedy. It's pornographic hopelessness, and it's pointless.

A knock to my particular copy of the book: some pages didn’t print properly, so one side would have very thin, hard to read lettering while the next page looked entirely bolded. It was annoying to read, especially in low light, but that's the fault of the printer, not the author.

This book is weak. Its main sin was trying to do too much with too little: too much soapboxing, too little characterization. Besides Sunny, a bright spot in the lackluster lineup, there is almost no depth to the characters beyond their assigned social justice crisis. A Fire So Wild wants to be about homelessness and climate change and classism and trauma and depression and recovery and growing up and choosing yourself and natural disasters and grief and cycles and systemic disenfranchisement, but there isn’t any time with 8 protagonists and only 196 pages to be about those things. And so it ends up being about……nothing at all.

Abigail and Taylor get divorced after their son leaves home.

Camila and Gabriel stay divorced, though friendly.

Sunny grieves Willow's death and begins the groundwork for a youth shelter.

Mar and Xavier breakup as Mar goes to college and Xavier joins a group of climate activists.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 0 Divorces: 2 Widowers: 1

Rating: ★✮☆☆☆ (1.5/5)

[divorce-fiction]

heart of the matter by Emily Giffin

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 1 Children Out-of-Wedlock: 1

If there is anything to say about Emily Giffin's novel, it's that the hook is impeccable. A bite-sized chapter that wafts the faint scent of a troubled marriage under your nose, before disappearing with a flourish and an ominous promise that the interrupted anniversary date is the canary in this couple's coal mine.

Tessa struggles with her stay-at-home life, managing two kids, and a husband, Nick, who is more dedicated to his job as a pediatric surgeon than anything else in his life. Tessa's easy acceptance of this fact is relieving, preventing the book from retreading the whiny diatribes of other wives. And yet, even as I type this I can feel the Monkey's Paw curling another finger because Tessa suffers from a far worse problem: Being boring. She's a main character, sure, but not really a protagonist.

Valerie, for her part, is doing something. A lawyer whose son suffers a horrific burn at another child's birthday, and his doctor is none other than Nick. She’s looking after her son, she’s falling in love, she’s grappling with herself. Tessa, in comparison, feels too much like a passive character; her narration mostly consists of generic thoughts on society and her social group with very little being said about her own inner life. I have no idea what she wants or what she’s doing to try and get it and this made her chapters more of a slog as you’re slowly steamrolled with all of the details and none of the action of her life.

There’s also the slightly jarring fact that Tessa’s chapter are all First Person POV, while Valerie’s are Third Person. My first inclination is that this is the author’s intention, to make us sympathize with Tessa and the slow death of her marriage, but when Valerie’s chapters are the more interesting ones it just feels like a record skip every time you swap from one to the other.

A very sweet element of the story is the attention given to familial relationships: Valerie with her brother, widowed mother, and darling son, Charlie, and Tessa with her divorced parents and children. Even Nick is given some time in the spotlight to show his paternal deftness with all three children. These interactions were always a joy to read, especially the final meeting where Tessa's parents set aside their festering resentment to reunite and support their daughter.

The quick plot summary can very literally be boiled down to: Nick and Valerie grow close as he takes care of her son, culminating in sex. Nick ends things with her, realizing what he's done to his wife. Tessa finds out 3/4 of the way through the book, despite having suspicions. Tessa meets Valerie and is unimpressed, but decides to try again with Nick.

At the end of the day, this book is well-written, but not particularly interesting. The main conflict fizzles out, reflecting the most responsible choice of real life, and leaves any passionate resolution to happen post-story and out of view. And perhaps disappointingly of all: No, they do not get divorced.

Tessa allows Nick to move back home and they stay married, committed to building a new relationship.

Valerie stays single, but resolves to track down Charlie's father and let him know he has a son.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 1 Children Out-of-Wedlock (for now?): 1

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

[divorce-fiction]

The Seven Day Switch by Kelly Harms

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 0

I hope we can all admit: Hatred is compelling. The Seven Day Switch thrives on this passion-in-negative, pitting Working Mom Wendy and Stay-At-Home Superhero Celeste against each other, but this not-so-cold war is only the beginning of a surprisingly non-ficitional take on a fictional bodyswap. Yes, the cliche of "I couldn't put this down!" but truly I didn't want to. This is no Morality Fiction, where the women end on a corny cryfest of how they were ~Both Wrong~ and the power of friendship makes them switch back. This is an examination of their shortcomings and justifications and public personas. This is a book that has heart AND brains.

There's also an introspective touch to the writing. Piling words high to the point of collapse, ambling setting descriptions without intent is the common technique for showing passage of time in a novel. Harms, in welcome contrast, runs the first-person film reel of Wendy and Celeste's entire thought process, with all of its rambling jumps and loose connections on full display. This makes you actually want to read through it to avoid missing out on the rich, internal world of these women.

The plot is this: After an uncommonly heavy night of drinking at a school fundraiser, Wendy and Celeste wake up the next morning in each other's bodies. There's the expected shock and stumbling, and they decide that a special, single-batch vodka Celeste ordered is to blame. They won't be able to get their hands on more until the next bottle is delivered in a week (title drop!) and, until then, entrepreneur Wendy intends to relax and homemaker Celeste plans to overhaul her neighbor's family.

I was anxious in the back of my head the entire time I was devouring this book. I expected that all of the lovely character development would result in a boring, Disney-style conclusion: Wendy would give up her productivity consulting business to make time for what was really important: Family. And Celeste would realize she was being too strict on her family and let her kids eat McDonald's once a week. Hooray!

Neither of these bland outcomes come true.

Or, perhaps that's burying the lede. Celeste's strictness is one of her greatest assets in the story, whipping Wendy's children into shape to help around the house, empowering them with responsibility, where Wendy, convinced she was the only one who could do everything correctly, had never delegated. It's shown as a true strength of her style of mothering, the militant care she puts into things like baking cupcakes for entrants to a science fair. The curse comes less as a blanket declaration about homemakers but about Celeste in specific: her husband makes all the money, and she has been pursuing absolute perfection to make up for only being a SAHM. Those science fair cupcakes might not NEED perfectly crafted DNA sugar helices made from scratch. She put herself second to everything in her life, never taking time to rest or take care of herself, to the point of ignoring a serious post-partum abdomen injury. Celeste isn't wrong in personality, she's just low in self-esteem. Her Mom of the Year act was never designed to shame the rest of the parents, but to justify her own existence.

Wendy, in contrast, is Working Mom of the Year: supporting her artist husband and over-achieving children, making feminist waves in the world of business-ownership, and still making time each day to be around her family for a whole hour. This balancing act belies an obvious truth: she isn't happy. But the solution isn't abandoning her ideals, and that's what's so comforting about this book. Neither of these women are in the wrong for how they want to live their lives, but how they've gone about it. They have mirror struggles, of never taking time for one's self. And Wendy's justification that her Excel-spreadsheet level scrambling makes her the best is undercut by the late reveal that her kids are a shameful compromise: in exchange for their birth, she agreed that her husband, Seth, would never have to lift a finger to help with them or her business or her life.

Shameful for Seth, that is. This man sucks so incredibly I don't even want to devote words to it. He's hot, yes, but also secretive and lazy and dismissive and unhelpful and resentful without intent to improve. Imagine the worst partner whose behavior you condone with "At least he's not abusive." That's Seth.

And Celeste's husband, Hugh?

“Of course,” [Hugh] says, without so much as a pause. “Whatever you need. Celeste, I don’t know what’s been going on this week, but I do know I love you, no matter what. When you’re ready to talk, I hope it’s me you talk to. Got that?” (pg. 240)

Hugh. Is. Amazing. I teared up at his devotion, his love for his wife. Taking on what most fathers would consider 'babysitting' when his wife seems to be in the midst of a mental breakdown, running interference on snobs at a gala dinner so his wife can enjoy her night out, oozing with attraction towards a woman who sees herself as 'over the hill'. I know men/husbands/fathers like this exist, but they’re so few and far between it’s often easier to pretend they don’t. He's a high-powered corporate executive who loves his wife, his kids, and his life. He's perfect. I want to run him through a cloning machine. No notes.

One last note: it’s the tiniest mention, something you’d normally blaze right past in your rush to finish a story: there’s a non-binary character in this book. Nameless, faceless, descriptionless. But with specified they/them pronouns that the characters respect. A hospital receptionist that exists for a paragraph and is intensely normalized. I like it. More of this, please.

Celeste and Hugh stay married and perfect forever.

Wendy and Seth get divorced after Seth's infidelity is discovered.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 1 Divorces: 1

Rating: ★★★★✮ (4.5/5)

[divorce-fiction]

[divorce-fiction]

The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 1 Widows: 1

The Gifted School starts with this POV: a child is taking a test and they show signs of stress. This hook is so boring I nearly put the book in the 'Nevermind' pile. When confronted with prose that makes my eyes glaze over I normally do a Hop-And-Skip reading, taking in enough chunks to understand the basic plot, and then go straight to the end to satisfy that itchy Completionist need. But then I found myself skipping less and less pages. And then I wasn't skipping at all and was reading a fairly grounded story with realistic, character-driven drama that kept enough of a tense and teasing air to get me to the finish line.

The plot is this: 4 families in an affluent neighborhood compete to get their children into a publicly funded gifted school. The appeal of free tuition and accolades is too alluring of a promise to keep these parents from lying, scheming, and attempting to buy their way in. Of the main 6 kids, only siblings Xander and Tessa make the cut in the end.

And let's talk about Xander for a minute. Chess-obsessed and possessing a near photographic memory, his chapters are undeniably from the perspective of a preteen with autism. This is never stated outright, it's never brought up as him being a burden or hindrance, and his misunderstandings of social dynamics are never a major point of contention. He is a natural part of the story, not a 'special' obstacle for his family. It was refreshing, downright RELAXING to see so much care and accuracy put into his portrayal.

The majority of the writing is dedicated to the relationships and stressors between the 4 main mothers (Rose-married, Samantha-married, Azra-divorced, Lauren-widowed). It tries to explore classism in a very modern 'look at your own white guilt' kind of way, but leaves a lot to be desired. A few chapters are from the POV of Atik, the son of a maid, but they feel out of place in the narrative as a whole due to their infrequency.

The best written chapters are from Azra's ex-husband's POV. Beck's world is in constant decline over the course of the story, from alienating the au-pair-mistress-turned-new-wife-and-mother-of-his-baby to mounting financial troubles that he dumps onto credit cards. I can't help but wonder if this was Holsinger's best character because he was 'writing what he knows'.

Beck and Sonja (the au pair) stay married because he starts making an effort.

Lauren continues dating her boyfriend, Glen.

Rose and Gareth (husband) divorce after it's revealed he is the father of Samantha's daughter, Emma (who is best friends with their daughter, also Emma).

Samantha and Kev (husband) stay married, despite the infidelity.

Final Tally:

Marriages: 1 Divorces: 2 Widows: 1

Rating: 3/5 ★★★☆☆