Lauren Fox

Most domestic novels center around marital struggles, but this one focuses on the equally important relationship in most women's lives: their best friend. Isabel and Josie are two teachers up against their middle school, suburban world - and their congruent snark is very wittily portrayed by the author. Their husbands are friends too, and everything works well until a series of unpredictable events undoes all their lives.

Told in Isabel's voice, every encounter with each character - show more especially her mother (who came to the US before the Holocaust survivor and refuses to share her memories) and her daughter Hannah, on the verge of becoming an unfamiliar teen, reads as if you are in the room.

Isabel's wildly gyrating internal thoughts provoke her outrageous actions - and we are with her all the way as she tries to recover from the loss of Josie. The end of the book, though satisfying, feels like Isabel's - the true loss of the company of an adored BFF. show less

Can a book about grief be funny? Yes. It can be funny, and heartfelt, and nostalgic, and clever, and unbearably sad all wrapped up together. Lauren Fox pulls this off brilliantly in her new book “Days of Awe.”

On the surface, we see main character Isabel Moore face of year of grief and struggle: the death of her best friend, the demise of her marriage, the frailty of her aging mother, and the growing resentment of her tween daughter. But Fox isn’t content to let the story sit on the show more surface. She digs into the inner lives of her characters and exposes raw human emotion and connection – the depth of female friendships, the strength of mother-daughter bonds, the thrill of falling in love, and the pain of recognizing that love is gone.

I loved Fox’s writing style – which had me wanting to read more and more. I also loved her sense of humor. Several exchanges in the book had me laughing out loud. Other sections of the book made me cringe, only because they were so real I felt uncomfortable for the characters. I am eager to look into Fox’s other books as I enjoyed this one so much.

5 stars.

Thank to you NetGalley and Knopf for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. show less

Book on CD performed by Amy Rubinate


From the book jacket: For Willa Jacobs, seeing her best friend, Jane Weston, is like looking in a mirror on a really good day. Strangers assume they are sisters, a comparison Willa secretly enjoys. They share an apartment, clothing, and groceries, eking out rent with part-time jobs. Willa writes advertising copy, dreaming up inspirational messages for tea bags, while Jane cleans houses and writes poetry about it, rhyming “clog of hair” with “fog of show more despair.” Together Willa and Jane are a fortress of private jokes and shared opinions, with a friendship so close there’s hardly room for anyone else. But when Ben, Willa’s oldest friend, reappears and falls in love with Jane, Willa wonders: Can she let her two best friends find happiness with each other if it means leaving her behind?

My reactions
I really enjoyed this exploration of friendship and the choices one makes as one matures. I remember close friends I had in my twenties … how we’d hang out at each other’s apartments, sometimes spending the night, watching movies, sharing PB sandwiches, taking a walk to the park or a Saturday matinee. And, like the characters in Fox’s novel, we’d create terrible puns and inside jokes that, looking back, were truly dreadful, but which made us feel clever and bright and “in charge of our destiny.”

While I’ve never experienced the kind of implosion that this trio is headed for, I have witnessed (and been part of) break-ups that hurt so badly you wondered how you would ever survive. And I recognized how a best friend can say just the right thing to help you through what you believe to be the darkest moments. So the relationships between these people and their emotions were completely relatable to me, even though I am more than twice as old as they are.

Willa narrates, and so we get more of her internal dialogue and exploration of her feelings about what is happening between her and Ben and Jane. I would have liked to have heard more from both Jane and Ben’s perspectives.

I loved all the references to local establishments. I don’t often read books set in Milwaukee, and the setting contributed to my easily relating to the book’s characters and plot. There’s also a very interesting subplot involving Willa’s brother, Seth.

Amy Rubinate does a fine job performing the audiobook version. There are many scenes where the two women have quick back and forth banter and I was never confused about who was speaking. show less

Isabel Moore, the appealingly flustered forty-something protagonist of Lauren Fox’s novel Days of Awe, is grappling with several profound and sudden changes in her life. In the space of a few devastating months, her husband Chris has moved out of the house and into an apartment on his own, her daughter Hannah, on the cusp of adolescence, has inexplicably transformed from a smiling little girl into a sulky brat, and her out-spoken and rebellious best friend Josie has been killed in a single show more car crash. The action depicts Isabel’s attempts to compensate for and understand a series of painful losses and her struggle to adjust to a revised sense of self within reduced personal circumstances. Temperamentally, Isabel is somewhat passive: an indifferent disciplinarian, a follower-of-rules who is often shocked by Josie’s mutinous attitudes and defiant behaviour. Both are teachers. Their friendship developed and solidified within that context over a dozen or so years, eventually growing warm and trusting. But in the months leading up to Josie’s accident, Isabel noticed a change in her friend’s demeanor and conduct: an emotional withdrawal and a not-so-subtle shift from simply flaunting acceptable behaviours to outright recklessness. After Josie’s death, the fact that Isabel did almost nothing to explore this change and find out what was causing it is a constant source of guilt. Similarly, she is knocked for a loop when Chris moves out, and seems helpless when confronted by Hannah’s snarly eye-rolling. It is Isabel’s lack of preparedness for the obstacles that life flings in her path that makes her so sympathetic and believable: her candid assessment of herself as someone with no road map for the future, someone who never sees it coming, someone who puts on a brave face but is actually making it up as she goes along. We have all felt that way, especially when life blindsides us with some calamity, but we push forward regardless because society demands that we pretend to have it all under control. Isabel the narrator is under no such constraint, and her fumbling and mostly unsuccessful attempts to deal with the ever more complex challenges of day-to-day living—not to mention her own emotions which, as the pressure mounts, become volatile and unpredictable—provide welcome moments of hilarity within the novel’s tragic framework. Fox’s writing is vivid and engaging, and the narrative is punctuated by wry observations on family, love and parenthood and Isabel’s ironic and self-deprecating admissions of incompetence in just about every aspect of her own life. Days of Awe is a witty, wise and entertaining work of fiction by a writer with a deft comic flair, and if the ending is a bit tidy and abrupt, it hardly detracts from the novel’s emotional clout. show less