Review by Booklist Review
ldquo;There is no way back to the past." Freeman's debut novel tells a moving story about grief, love, and memory. A woman who is initially introduced to readers as "Nada" arrives at a seaside town, accompanied only by the pain she carries with her. She works odd jobs, exchanging her services and sex for lodging. Sitting on the beach at night, she reflects on her late miscarriage, a loss that consumes her with grief and pushes her into isolation. Forced to find steady income, "Mara" takes a job at a wine shop and develops a relationship with the store's owner, Simon, who has his own familial problems. Their slow-burning romance reignites Mara's emotions, offering her the peace and comfort so clearly absent in her life; however, complications arise. "There are those who leave and there are those who are leftover," Mara reflects. Freeman's prose is beautiful and translucent. Mirroring the ebb and flow of water, short paragraphs leave lots of empty spaces on the page, enhancing the emotional gut punches latent in the text, while moments of heightened action run uninterrupted. In the end, Mara continues to carry her old and new pains but ultimately reasserts herself, promising readers a glimmer of hope and new beginnings.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An emotionally charged story of wanderlust and longing unfolds in Freeman's captivating debut. After an unspecified and devastating loss, Mara, 36 and divorced with no children, walks out on her life, leaving a note behind for her brother and sister-in-law ("I'll be fine!"). She ends up in a nondescript seaside town in an unspecified region, where she drifts with a surreal sense of detachment and dwindling funds. Freeman drops clues to Mara's heartache in spare prose that's punctuated by humor and denial: "This is not that," Mara tells herself when confronted with reminders of her desire to be a mother, such as children's swimsuits left hanging over banisters and toys partially buried in the sand. She dissociates from her feelings in any number of ways, including indulging in fantasies about what her brother might have to say about her disappearance. Desperate for money, she finds a job at a local wine shop; equally desperate for food, she resorts to stealing. Her boss, Simon, notices the inner struggle at Mara's core and quickly becomes the one connection she has in an otherwise muted and lonely life. With an intricate narrative and in deceptively simple language, Freeman captures the full extent of loss. Complicated and enchanting, this prismatic examination of emotional endurance is a winner. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Freeman here profiles a woman blasted by grief who ends up in a posh seaside town after running from her family. She barely survives, cadging food and swimming in the ocean at night, until the tourist season ends and she lands a job at the local wine store. There she starts building ties with the lonely owner, and the reasons for her grief emerge. First serial to Granta magazine; Freeman won a Henfield Prize from Columbia University while earning her MFA there.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
After losing a child, a woman attempts to start anew in a coastal town. After her baby is stillborn--and unable to bear living in the apartment directly above her brother and his newborn son, whose cries remind her daily of her loss--37-year-old Mara has only one goal: "to slip into a blind spot, to run out on her life." She heads for a seaside town where she knows no one, determined to live as ruinously as possible. She drinks as much as she can, eats as little as possible, and sleeps sometimes on the beach, sometimes in strangers' beds. With her financial resources dwindling, Mara takes a job in a wine shop and begins living surreptitiously in the store's attic room. Her boss, Simon, is suffering too: His wife has left him, taking their young daughter. As Mara begins to warm to Simon, her character and her past begin to take shape: her childhood in Quebec with a difficult mother, an absent father, and a loyal younger brother; her relationship with her husband. Told in image-heavy, crystalline fragments of prose, sometimes only one or two sentences to a page, Freeman's novel reads like a shattered mirror gradually being pieced together, though the reflection, as in real life, never comes perfectly clear. For much of the novel's first half, Freeman keeps Mara as a cipher, less a character and more simply a vessel for grief and self-destructive impulses. But as Mara's character sharpens into focus, the narrative restraint gives way in pieces like a sudden calving of ice. What is left is a portrait of a woman's psyche pared to the core, to unsettling effect. As the narrator says of Mara: "She knows: if there is a mistake to be made, she will make it." An intense and lyrical debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
