Review by Library Journal Review
Hargrave (The Dance Tree) departs medieval Europe for late-1970s Paris in her third adult novel. Eighteen-year-old Erica is spending the summer before university in Paris, where she meets Laure, a graduate student at the Sorbonne. Their connection is instant, physical, and intense. Yet for Erica, it is also deciduous, shed when summer ends and she returns to England. Laure, many times a lover but never in love, cannot dig herself out from the despair of Erica's departure. Their lives intersect with regularity over a dozen years. Whenever physically proximate, the two are besotted with each other. Politics, sexuality, illness, and class have supporting roles in the narrative. Reminiscent of Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You and Pages for Her, Hargrave's story fits narrative and chronological span into one volume. It seems like the word "almost" in the title functions as an adjective: not exactly life, but almost. Do the paths not taken here form shadow lives for each protagonist, or are the almost lives the ones they're living? VERDICT Hargrave's writing is strong and propulsive, though not all readers will be satisfied with the ending she delivers.--Jessica Epstein
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A great love between two women is continually found, discarded, and rediscovered in this lyrical meditation on paths taken. Erica and Laure meet on the steps of Sacré-Cœur in 1978 when the 18-year-old English tourist stumbles across the gorgeous Parisian reading and smoking. Before long they're a pair, at least for the summer weeks that remain before Erica starts university back in Norfolk. Over the next three decades they'll freeze each other out, engage in a torrid extramarital (at least for Erica) tryst, visit each other's happiest homes, and finally extract some wisdom from their bond. In other words, Hargrave has written a big love story with occasional echoes of McEwan'sAtonement and Austen'sPersuasion--but with a spine stiffened less by pure longing and more by immediate loss. Erica fits in easily with Laure's circle of friends, their ringleader a gay café owner named Michel who creates "a safe space, a place where gay men and women, transsexuals and bisexuals were welcome." While passing years see increased acceptance of same-sex relationships, they don't mitigate the complications Erica's bisexuality brings, or the sheer tragedy of Michel's death from AIDS. The author moves between descriptions of seedy squats (in one, Laure used a "glug jug" for midnight toileting) to places of peace and order, like Erica and her writer husband Anthony's coastal home, underscoring both how unimportant luxury is to real intimacy and what a disguise it can be to its lack. Even when the two women experience deep connection, they distrust it, perhaps because they gave it up early in their relationship. Perversely, it's in scenes free from sexual tension, like caring for Michel as he grows frail or enjoying the company of Erica and Ant's young daughters, where the human longing for sexual communion stands out most clearly, as an urge toward life and creativity. Hargrave's novel sounds a deep note of the consequences of ignoring one's own heart and breaking the hearts of others. Hargrave's lush, thoughtful novel underscores the way any sexual choice contains elements of both freedom and limitation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
