Aidan Donnelley Rowley

I used to race through walks, treating them as a purely exercise related thing. The older I get though, the more I ramble instead. Now when I walk outside, I am slower. I notice the budding trees. I appreciate the light, delicate birds that fly across my path. I stand and stare at the deer I come across so as not to startle them into running off. And while this all sounds idyllic, I also see the dog poop that no one has bothered to pick up. I notice the bits of trash and detritus that have show more blown out of garbage cans. I startle over snakes or small dead critters. I swat at mosquitoes. But these latter things do not take away from the beauty of the former. They are a part of the whole but they are not the whole. So when I ramble through nature and life, I can focus on the less pleasant experiences and allow them to drive me inside my house of my shell, or I can accept them as part of the makeup of a generally pretty wonderful experience. In Aidan Donnelley Rowley's beautiful novel, The Ramblers, her characters are learning to experience the whole of everything without letting the unpalatable or scary overwhelm the amazing, promising parts of their lives. Each has faced a loss that continues to mark them and to direct their reactions until they understand that the beauty of life is in the living of it, the opening up to experience, and the courage to risk your heart. As they ramble through this ode to New York City and their own lives, they discover that they may not be following the map they once planned for, but because of that they are finding that most wonderful thing of all: unexpected joy.

Clio is a respected ornithologist who also takes groups on bird watching walks through the Ramble in Central Park. After one of her walks, she met older, handsome hotelier Henry. The two seemed perfect for each other. Both are workaholics and neither are looking for marriage and family. Until Henry changes his mind and wants to build a shared life with Clio. But Clio hasn't been entirely truthful with Henry and her secret, the reason she doesn't want to commit, may scare Henry off. She can't decide if telling him or walking away from him would be worse. As she grapples with her fears, her roommate Smith is having to look head on at her own loss. Her younger sister is getting married and every aspect of the wedding reminds Smith of the ex-fiance she still loves. When she hears how he has moved on in his life, she is devastated. Couple that with the fact that she sees Clio on the cusp of a huge, potentially life changing decision and the fact that Smith is still living in the same building as her parents, still just a part of her extremely wealthy family rather than an individual standing on her own two feet (even her very successful organizing, life coach business was started with seed money from her father despite his disapproval), and she is feeling left behind and lonely. Tate, a fellow classmate of both Clio and Smith's at Yale, is back in New York and hurting. He developed and sold an app for a lot of money but that success didn't stop his wife from leaving him. So he's come back to the East Coast in order to pursue his love of photography, something that took a backseat to business for too long.

The novel is narrated from each of the three main characters' perspectives, showing their innermost fears and what holds each of them back. They are all complex and real feeling with distinctive voices. Clio, Smith, and Tate are all privileged but their problems are universal and they, as characters, are sympathetic despite their privilege. The novel is intimate feeling but with a satisfying depth to it. Rowley details mental illness and its toll delicately and respectfully. And she writes with an engaging, smooth adeptness that keeps the reader invested in each of these broken but healable people. This is a novel of loss and acceptance, fear and love, friendship and possibility, and it celebrates the power of finding joy in the small things around us, opening our hearts to trust, and the happy surprise of finding the unexpected. It was a delightful read. show less

There are some books that are important because of what they have to say. There are others that are important because of how they make one feel. While it would be easy to classify Life After Yes as a book that is meant to teach readers a bit about life and becoming an adult, the true import of it lies in its emotional pull. For, it is the type of book that is easily forgotten a day or two after finishing it but it is the emotions felt while reading it that are the only thing to linger. show more Readers may not be able to discuss specifics months, weeks, or even days after, but they can discuss how the book made them feel. Confusion, blissful happiness, concern, dread, anxiety, hope, love, fear, sorrow – it is all there as Quinn undergoes a massive transformation from a selfish, superficial girl into someone mature enough to move on to the next stage of adulthood.

It may be a forgettable plot, but there are some redeeming qualities to Life After Yes, not including the powerful emotional connections one feels towards Quinn. Life After Yes is remarkably well-written with a depth to it that is as welcome as it is unexpected. The philosophical discussions about becoming a grown-up are brilliant as well as eye-opening, regardless of the age of the reader. The devastation and lasting trauma from September 11th are also pitch-perfect. Quinn’s trauma will dredge up memories and the strong emotions everyone felt on that fatal day. Most importantly, Quinn is so alive. She is vibrant, massively flawed, and very real. Love her or hate her, she is a force of nature.

Life After Yes has all of the hallmarks of a cute, flippant, coming-of-age romance and does teeter on that edge several times. However, Ms. Rowley’s brilliant characterizations and stellar writing save the novel from becoming too clichéd and create something more serious and philosophical than any romance story ever is. The details behind Quinn’s journey are not as important as the impressions and emotions one gets from following her on her journey and even those are not nearly as important as the lessons one learns and can adapt for one’s own life. show less

4.5 stars.

Thanksgiving week proves to be eventful and life altering for the main characters in Aidan Donnelley Rowley's delightfully engaging novel, The Ramblers.

Clio Marsh is stunned when her boyfriend of six months, hotelier Henry Kildare, surprises her with an invitation to move in with him. Never having been in a serious relationship, her feelings for Henry run deep, but the realization their romance is more than just a fling highlights her inability to tell him about her dysfunctional show more past. Having let him intentionally misunderstand the cause of her mother's death, Clio panics at the thought of revealing her family's history with mental illness to him. She is also trying to navigate her troubled relationship with her father and when she learns he has sold the family home, Clio spends one last Thanksgiving with him and at the same time, makes peace with the ghosts of her past.

Clio's roommate and long time friend Smith Anderson has also had a difficult year after her fiancé inexplicably ended their engagement the previous Thanksgiving. Without warning or explanation, he broke things off and much to her dismay, married another woman not long after breaking her heart. Her heartache was further exacerbated by her younger sister's engagement and while Smith is happy for the couple, she cannot help feeling envious as she helps plan for the upcoming wedding. At the same time, she is still trying to prove to her wealthy father that her personal organization business is not a waste of her talents or education and that she is completely happy with her career path.

Smith's path unexpectedly crosses with one of her and Clio's former college classmates, Tate Pennington, who has newly returned to New York following the collapse of his marriage. At loose ends as he waits for his divorce to become final, Tate has recently sold his wildly successful PhotoPoet app to Twitter and now wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, he is pursuing his dream of becoming a photographer. Drinking a little too much as he tries to get over his soon to ex-wife and figure out what comes next for him, Tate is surprised by his attraction to Smith but are either of them emotionally ready for a new relationship?

Told through alternating chapters from each of the characters' perspectives, their individual stories spring vividly to life as they try to find their way through the unexpected changes in their lives. Smith and Clio's friendship has flourished over the years and they provide one another with unwavering support and offer valuable insight as they work through their individual issues. While Tate has his own group of acquaintances he interacts with socially, his new friendship with Smith helps him begin to truly move forward with the new life he is building in New York.

The Ramblers is an engrossing novel of family, friendship and love. Each of the characters are vibrantly developed with easy to relate to problems to overcome. Aidan Donnelley Rowley does an outstanding job weaving together the various storylines into a breathtaking journey of healing for Clio, Smith and Tate. An outstanding novel that I absolutely loved and highly recommend to readers of literary fiction. show less

The Ramblers was my favorite reading experience of 2016 so far (as of February).

Clio Marsh, Smith Anderson, and Tate Pennington were all classmates at Yale. Clio and Smith have been roommates for well over a decade–first in college, then in an apartment in the famed high-rise near Central Park where Smith’s family lives, and from which she runs The Order of Things, her personal-organizing business. Since earning her doctorate in ornithology at Columbia, Clio has worked as a curator at show more the Museum of Natural History and leads weekend bird-watching walks through the Ramble in Central Park. Tate wasn’t really on either woman’s radar back in their university days, but he’s recently returned to the East Coast after selling the photo app he developed with a college friend, and after he and Smith encounter each other at a Yale tailgate party one November weekend, they’re both on each other’s.

But both Smith and Tate are in relationship recovery mode–she’s still coping with the emotional fallout of a broken engagement as she prepares for her sister’s wedding, and his divorce isn’t exactly final yet. Clio’s got her own fallout to sort through. Her recent panic attack at the prospect of moving in with her boyfriend is the legacy of a lifetime of anxiety in dealing with her bipolar mother, who committed suicide a year earlier…and she has yet to tell Henry about any of it.

The preppy character names and Ivy League references might be a little off-putting to some readers–I’ll admit they made even me a little nervous, and fiction about privileged New Yorkers is literary catnip for me. But the people Donnelley depicts in The Ramblers are so much more than “privileged New Yorkers,” They’re struggling with complicated emotions and big, life-affecting choices. Their relationships both challenge and strengthen them, and the characters’ interactions and conversations ring true to life (well, mostly–Smith’s father is a bit of a caricature, but I get the feeling that was intentional on the author’s part).

The Ramblers was an engrossing and highly satisfying novel–fun, thoughtful, and not afraid to go deep.

MORE: https://3rsblog.com/2016/02/book-talk-ramblers-aidan-donnelley-rowley.html show less