Days of Awe

June 15, 2015
Following the success of her first two novels (Still Life with Husband and Friends Like Us), Fox lays out a tale about a woman’s attempt to piece her life together following the death of her best friend. When Josie dies unexpectedly in a car accident, her closest friend, Isabel, is left with nagging guilt, a broken marriage, a strained relationship with her preteen daughter, and the challenge of grieving and moving forward. Through painful months of doubt, anguish, and depression, Isabel reconciles herself to the truth that her actions bear no responsibility for the fatal outcome. This realization, however mollifying, comes just as Chris, her husband, moves out of their house in the Midwest into his own apartment. And to add to her misery, Isabel discovers him on a date with their marriage counselor shortly after their daughter begs to move in with him full-time. It’s not until Josie’s mother drags her to a support group for recent divorcées that she begins to see the possibility of love after so much loss. Filled with insecurities and anxieties, Isabel’s nuanced character is relatable—her struggles are universal and the reader will root for her to succeed. Raw and darkly humorous at times, Fox’s novel is a winner.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
When a middle school teacher's best friend dies in a one-car accident, her world begins to fall apart. Isabel Applebaum Moore and Josie Abrams have been inseparable since Izzy's first day at Rhodes Avenue Middle School, keeping each other sane through the principal's inane speeches and the younger teachers' aggressive perkiness-not to mention the students' hormonal moods. Josie even married Mark, Izzy's friend since kindergarten, where they were seated next to each other, "two little alphabetized Jews, dark haired and slightly lost in a forest of Midwestern consonant clusters, all those strapping, blond Schultzes and Metzgers and Hrubys and Przybylskis-strapping even in kindergarten, if memory serves." What happens following Josie's death isn't all that unusual: Isabel starts spending most of her time in her ratty old sweatpants, "which Josie used to call a blend of cotton and self-loathing"; her overwhelming sadness deals the fatal blow to her already rocky marriage to the good-hearted Chris; her 11-year-old daughter, Hannah, who also loved Josie, struggles with her changing family; her mother, Helene, a Holocaust survivor, coaxes her into attending a support group for "relationships in transition," where she tentatively bonds with a good-looking older man named Cal by cracking jokes-just the way she bonded with Josie at their first staff meeting at Rhodes Avenue. Josie pushes Chris away and tries to pull him closer; she does the same with Cal and even with her old friend Mark. She thinks back on her relationship with Josie and gradually reveals the secrets they shared. What makes the book so special is Isabel's smart, acerbic voice and her way of seeing everything from a sharp angle. Fox (Friends Like Us, 2012, etc.) studs Izzy's narration with surprising metaphors, turning ordinary domestic items into dangerous beasts ("the herd of wild minivans") and Josie's fatal accident into something almost domestic ("Her rusty 11-year-old Toyota skidded off the slick road like a can of soup rolling across a supermarket aisle"). Isabel (and Fox) has such an offbeat way of looking at things that you'll eagerly keep reading just to see what she's going to say next. Read it for the magnetic voice and Fox's ever interesting perspective on work, love, friendship, and parenthood-because, really, what else is there?

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June 1, 2015
Fortyish middle-school teacher Isabel's world crumbles in the year following the sudden death of her best friend, Josie. Her mother, Helene, has had a stroke; her husband, Chris, moves out of the house; her daughter, Hannah, turns into a sullen, moody adolescent. While giving herself up to grief over Josie, Isabel reflects on earlier losses as well; she has had several miscarriages, and part of Helene's family perished in the Holocaust. But despite the weight of sadness, Isabel is a clever, self-deprecating narrator, and humor lights up her descriptions of, for example, three younger teachers, in their slim trousers and their confident low heels, whom she and Josie dubbed the Andes because of similarities in their names, and a support group, Relationships in Transition, that Helene convinces her to join. As Isabel learns to move on, she also learns to accept some truths about her friendJosie's adventurous spirit skirted dangerously close to recklessness at times. Fox is also author of the well-received Friends like Us (2012).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)