2021-12-24
In this novel, a group of close friends faces a variety of marital troubles.
Sheila Leclaire’s friends are not doing great. Allie’s marriage has fallen apart after her husband’s infidelity. The breakup has shaken Valencia’s confidence in her own new marriage. She loves her husband, with whom she just eloped, but how can she be sure he won’t betray her at some point in the future? Mary’s marriage is undergoing a different sort of crisis. She and her husband definitely want to have kids, but she’s just learned from a doctor that she isn’t able to conceive. As the core of the group, Sheila is doing her best to provide sound advice and a supportive shoulder for her friends, especially the struggling Allie. “Allie was a lot of things,” Sheila narrates. “She was intelligent, brave, understanding, strong, fun, and bold. But she was also very wise. She wasn’t born smart, but she learned her lessons through dealing with life. She walked down some difficult paths and even after she would lose the battles, she did not let it stop her.” At the same time, the story explores Allie’s origins, particularly the love affair between her parents that led to betrayal, addiction, and ultimately death. The question is: Can love end any other way? At its best, Foster’s prose is urgent and magnetic, as here where Valencia starts to suspect her husband is cheating: “She felt a shiver running down her spine; she had goosebumps. At that moment, she radiated heat. She rushed to look at herself in the mirror. Clearly, she was scared to death. The thought had taken over her mind, and she refused to get it out of her head.” But in this sequel, the author is a chronic underwriter: She underexplains her characters’ situations and underdescribes their environments. Characters eat unspecified “food.” In one section, when Allie is breaking down in front of Sheila, it only becomes clear they are sitting in a restaurant seven pages into the scene, when Sheila motions for a waitress. Readers will spend so much time trying to figure out what is going on that the pleasures of the larger plot will be frequently stifled.
A dramatic, intriguing but uneven tale about love and female friendship.
