A Wrecked Shell of a Woman

Stalwart, loyal, trusty readers, thank you for checking back!  I did not perish in the snow, and I hope you didn't either. 

Let me ease back into blogging with a book recommendation for you. 

How good is Anna Monardo's novel Falling in Love with Natassia?  Let me put it this way.  I came home tired last night and thought I'd sit down and read a chapter or two after supper. 

400+ pages and many hours later, when the night was turning gray outside my windows, I turned the last page and fell into a dazed, dazzled sleep.  I was just unable to put it down. 

Any reader of serious literary fiction will be intrigued by the novel:  its thickly developed, surprising characters, the unobtrusive poetry of its language, the hard, beautiful truth of its themes.  After not very long at all, I didn't feel like I was reading; I felt like I was inside a world, watching real lives. 

I especially recommend it to readers who were or are or visit therapists.  (You know who you are.)  While some fiction mocks therapists, taking cheap shots where it can, Falling in Love with Natassia includes  two therapist-characters who are pivotally important (one profoundly ambivalent therapist is a main character), and it manages to make a therapy session (only briefly, I promise!) the stuff of serious drama. 

Today, of course, I'm practically useless due to my self-imposed sleep deprivation, a wrecked shell of a woman with dark hollows under her eyes and a dreamy smile on her lips.  And I have you, Anna Monardo, to thank.