Lauren Fox

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

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

Lauren Fox's novel, [Days of Awe], is the story of a friendship, of a family, of grief, of pain, of betrayal, and of acceptance. It is Isabel's story, as she grapples with the recent death of her best friend, the disintegration of her marriage, and the resentment of her daughter. I thought Isabel was a great character - believably flawed but good, exhausted by life but always striving to do better, and wryly funny, as well as self-aware. The novel's main flaw, to me, was that I occasionally show more got confused by the muddled timeline so that I wasn't sure when what was being described happened in terms of previous events. As a flaw, it's a pretty minor one, though. This was an all-around satisfying read - funny and sad and bittersweet and tender. I will be looking for more by Ms. Fox.

4 stars show less