Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Somers (Stay Up with Hugo Best) offers a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity. Cora and Eliot live in the Hudson Valley with their two small children. Having moved there from New York City, Cora confronts the malaise of small-town married life, and when she meets the also-married Sam, a fellow transplant, at a group for parents and their babies, her interest is piqued. Cora and Sam go out for drinks and wind up kissing, after which Cora begins fantasizing about meeting Sam at a hotel in a neighboring town to have sex. In this imaginary parallel life, Cora gets pregnant by Sam and has an abortion. Though the fantasy makes an affair appear untenable in her real life, she continues allowing herself to be tempted. She befriends Sam's wife, Jules, and the families vacation together in Cape Cod. There, Jules gives Sam the business for skinny-dipping with Cora, and Cora and Sam cool it for a while. Her fantasies become increasingly wild as she envisions Sam and her engaging in a threesome with a Frenchman they meet in Paris, once again setting up the potential for a full-blown affair and causing fantasy and reality to blur. Somers offers a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery ("Passion was what went on in the other world... between two people with unwholesome fixations on each other, determined to do something stupid"). Readers will find this hard to put down. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Somers follows up her debut, Stay Up with Hugo Best, with this slow-to-develop story of love, lust, friendship, and marriage. Cora and Sam meet as parents at a baby play group in a small town outside New York City. Although each is happily married to someone else, they are undeniably attracted to each other. Determined to keep their relationship platonic, Cora begins fantasizing about a parallel life in which she and Sam have a lurid affair. As the years pass, reality and fantasy blend until neither Sam nor Cora is sure who they have become and what they are looking for. In this novel set during the 2020s, COVID takes a toll on the protagonists' mental health, job security, and relationships. While many readers may be able to relate to Cora's increasing dissatisfaction with her mundane life as a suburban mother with a dead-end job, others will struggle to empathize. VERDICT Somers successfully evokes memories of the emotionally destabilizing years early in the pandemic, when sometimes fantasy was the only way to cope with reality, but many readers may find it's too soon to revisit that era. An additional purchase.--Darcy Mohr
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Across two timelines, one imaginary and one real, a young mother carries out an affair with a dad from her parenting group. Cora has a boring email job "writing about marketing," and she lives upstate on "the mountain side" of town in gentle chaos with her husband, Eliot, and two children. When she meets Sam, the two immediately align themselves against the other members of the parenting group and set their sights on one another. "Two vectors ran parallel through Cora's existence. One was what you might call reality, with bills…and the endless depositing and retrieving of children. The other was her affair with Sam, technically fictional, its lies and illicit meetings, the racing pulse of infatuation." Somers describes both the failings and the familiarities of marriage with a voice that ranges from affectionate to ironic to downright acerbic. "Now that he was around all the time, she saw he was untenable," Cora thinks of Eliot mid-pandemic. "His crime was being too near and too himself.…The issues that had previously seemed small and forgivable now seemed large and egregious. How he ate all the time. How he got stoned every night, rendering himself useless." Desire for Sam courses under Cora's everyday indignities with Eliot, occasionally erupting into the real world in a fleeting, illicit glance or a moment of confession. Somers' approach to the affair is twice-refreshing--her masterful weaving of the imaginary with the real manages to juggle the banality of fantasy with scenes that are sexy or subversive. When the affair jumps timelines and threatens to upend Cora's real-life marriage, she must come to terms with what the experience says about the life she thought she wanted, now that her secret life "had been brought to heel." Somers' cool, intricate ode to millennial malaise satirizes the roles her generation tried--and failed--to outgrow. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
