Review by Booklist Review
Lombardo's second novel, following The Most Fun We Ever Had (2019), opens with an awkward grocery story encounter between middle-aged Julia and Helen, an older woman with whom Julia was once friends--a friendship linked to a horrible regret. We thus get the first of many subtle glimpses into Julia's past, dangled throughout this engaging tale which crisscrosses various decades of her life. First, the encounter with Helen dredges up memories of when Julia, as a lonely young mom, was drawn into Helen's comforting upper-middle-class world. Later chapters illuminate Julia's teen years, growing up poor with an aloof single mother, a fraught relationship that informs Julia's intimacy issues with her husband, among others. Back in the present, Julia is faced with an impending empty nest, with one child college-bound and the other about to be a parent himself. Lombardo loves her characters, taking time to peel back each of their layers through the time-lapse structure of the novel and her rich descriptions. Her depiction of the Chicago suburbs is also lovely. A sure bet for fans of Richard Russo and Jane Smiley.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lombardo (The Most Fun We Ever Had) returns with the pitch-perfect tale of a complicated friendship and the fallout from an extramarital affair. Julia Ames, 57, is a married mother of two living in a Chicago suburb. While grocery shopping for her husband's 60th birthday dinner, she encounters an older woman named Helen Russo, one of the "small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again." Julia first met Helen 20 years earlier in the botanic garden where she used to take her first child, Ben, when he was three. Back then, in her "pre-Helen energy," Julia was a "hollow-eyed, socially inept young mom" who cried easily. Helen, a wealthy retired attorney and mother of five, took Julia and Ben under her wing, welcoming them into her charmingly messy "Capital-H Home," where people were cheerfully discerning about wine and casually referenced their distinguished forebears. Julia, who came from modest means and was estranged from her mother, was enchanted. Lombardo effortlessly flits from Julia's present-day party preparations and other family occasions--Ben's wedding, her daughter's departure for college--to flashbacks of the women's burgeoning friendship, slowly building to the reason for its dissolution two years after it began: Julia's affair with Helen's 29-year-old son, Nathaniel, who had the "biceps of a Renaissance sculpture." Lombardo is compulsively readable and consistently funny, and it's impossible to look away as Julia continues to self-sabotage. This domestic drama hits all the right notes. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
As Julia approaches 60, she clarifies her identity as mother, wife, and daughter in this novel of domestic ambivalence. As well as a meditation on good and bad mothering, this is a novel about "marriage in the aftermath of an affair." Part-time librarian Julia Ames has settled into a long marriage with ever-patient, ever-loving (a little too perfect to believe) husband Mark in the Chicago suburbs. Now, as Julia and Mark face major changes--their 24-year-old son's impending marriage and fatherhood, their daughter's high school graduation and departure for college--a brief encounter with a once close friend prompts Julia to reexamine her personal history. In obsessive, sometimes repetitive detail, she rehashes instances of fear, resentment, and anxiety and her overpowering sense of not fitting in. She also relives the choices she made that almost derailed her life. Julia is not exactly a sympathetic or trustworthy character. Insecure and uncomfortable with most people, including her children--to whom she's offered deep but ambivalent love--she has difficulty expressing affection and tends to shut down difficult conversations with snarky wit. But if she is judgmental, she is most critical of herself and clearly wounded; her single mother had neither time nor inclination to parent her properly, and Julia's hints about a major adolescent trauma build to an eventual anticlimactic reveal. While the "preposterous political landscape" remains in the background, class and entitlement issues are front and center. In addition to her mother's emotional neglect, financial insecurity marred Julia's childhood, rendering her a cynical but keen-eyed observer of the wealthy, educated world in which she has landed, a world that allows Julia's crises, however initially unnerving, to end in soft landings. Lombardo's density of sociological and psychological details is immersive at best but can sometimes be enervating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
