Starred review from June 13, 2022
Three women consider their relationships with a white-collar criminal in this perfect outing from D’Erasmo (Wonderland). The lion’s share is narrated by Suzanne, whose ex-husband, Alan, “did things with people’s money that you aren’t really supposed to do” when they were married. After the divorce, Suzanne moves to Chesham, Mass., a down-at-the-heels Cape Cod beach town, to figure out her next move. The second woman is Lydia, whom Suzanne describes as “young, willowy, blonde.” Lydia, who is partially disfigured from a car accident, falls in love with Alan after he’s released from prison; her take on Alan is that “he’d done his time.” Then there’s Sylvia, Alan’s estranged mother, a former “wild child” in Suzanne’s view, from whom he inherited his talent with numbers. Into this nuanced story D’Erasmo drops an unexpected fifth character, a whale that beaches near Suzanne’s new home in Chesham. The whale—enormous, otherworldly, and in distress—awakens a part of Suzanne that she never knew existed. “Maybe,” she thinks, “all of our misfortune had happened to bring me there, to meet and help this grand, suffering creature.” The sentiment leads her to an act with cascading and devastating consequences for Lydia, Sylvia, and Alan. With smooth shifts in perspective and understated and precise prose, D’Erasmo demonstrates a mastery of the craft. The result is propulsive and profound.

July 15, 2022
A Massachusetts woman tries to rebuild her life after her husband goes to prison for a white-collar crime. Suzanne and Alan had a good life in Boston. They had a big house, with a housekeeper and a gardener, a darling if somewhat aimless son, the freedom to travel. All of this was courtesy of Alan's successful brokerage business and Suzanne's ability to keep the household running smoothly. But then everything blew up: Alan had been defrauding people and is sent to prison for his crimes, and Suzanne leaves, insisting to anyone who will listen, including the reader, that she didn't understand enough about money to know what Alan was doing, not really. The novel begins with Suzanne arriving in the seaside town of Chesham, trying to start her life over as a massage therapist (or "bodywork" practitioner), to reconnect with her college-age son, who has sided with Alan, and to come to terms with her own complicity in the collapse of her life. D'Erasmo sets herself up for a challenge, perhaps, in trying to make wealthy white-collar criminals sympathetic, but in many ways this circumstance is beside the point. Though Suzanne gets the most airtime, her central narrative is spliced together with the perspectives of two other women: Lydia, Alan's new wife, whom he met after being released from prison and who has demons of her own; and Sylvia, Alan's estranged mother. It's only in piecing together all three of these narratives that we get a fuller picture of Alan, and that's the point, through D'Erasmo's clever telling--people can never be seen whole, and parts you think you see never tell the full tale. "A real genealogy chart would trace damage back and back," Suzanne muses. "It would look like a kaleidoscope." Slow burning but thoughtful and deftly structured.

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August 1, 2022

D'Erasmo's fifth novel (after Wonderland) is told in the voice of the 50-ish Suzanne, whose lifestyle as a wealthy housewife ends abruptly when her husband, Alan, a charming sociopath, is imprisoned for financial crimes. She divorces him, estranging herself from her son, and moves to a Cape Cod resort town, where she ekes out a modest existence as a masseuse. Suzanne volunteers with community members assisting a whale beached on a nearby shore, prompting musings on society's wider complicities in destroying the environment. Later--the novel's timeline is purposefully vague--Alan is released and marries a once beautiful woman named Lydia, now partially disfigured from a fiery accident. Suzanne ultimately connects with Lydia and Alan's mother, Sylvia, a nomadic older woman who supports herself through small-time gambling and must ultimately ask herself how complicit she was in Alan's crime. VERDICT This enjoyable novel is filled with intriguing characters, whom D'Erasmo wrangles with deft changes of viewpoint, and the prose abounds with lyrical imagery. But its particular strength is its examination of that liminal space between innocence and culpability, leaving readers to judge whether these characters are as innocent as they want to believe.--Reba Leiding

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Starred review from August 1, 2022
Suzanne has concocted her own witness protection program, living on her wits in a bedraggled small town on Cape Cod, a far cry from her fancy life as the stylish wife of a financial wizard in prison for duping clients and leaving them destitute. Insisting that she had no idea what Alan was up to, she promptly divorced him and now their college-age son won't answer her calls. As Suzanne copes with limited funds, loneliness, and rage, a right whale becomes stranded on the beach. Rocked to her core by the animal's magnitude, majesty, and mystery, she throws herself into the rescue effort. Suddenly her woes seem insignificant. Aren't we all complicit in the decimation of the oceans and the whale's tragic fate? As Alan is released and marries a steely woman scorched by hellfire, Suzanne is pulled back into the force field of his crimes and subjected to evermore burning questions about her complicity. As in all her finely wrought, shrewdly piercing novels, D'Erasmo (Wonderland, 2014) keeps us recalibrating our perceptions. The details about the whale are dramatic and deeply affecting. Every human exchange is fraught, and our feelings about Suzanne rise and fall like the tides. An arresting and intricately spun inquiry into talent, resentment, and risk, love and betrayal, self and community, guilt and retribution.

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