Days of Awe

A gripping novel that keeps the reader thinking while reading.... how easily life can change.  Author, Lauren Fox compares the mother daughter relationship in multiple generations, showing how outside influences can affect those relationships.  Isabel Moore has a precarious relationship with her mother, Helene, a Holocaust survivor and now after the death of her best friend, Isabel is in danger of ruining her relationship with her own young daughter.  Fox examines how close to the edge a marriage and friendships sit when a person loses their balance and life events leave them on the precipice of a cliff of depression.  We follow Isabel as she struggles away from the edge of the cliff, with a look back at her friendship with Josie and her everyday interactions going forward with her daughter, her mother and her almost ex-husband.

"I didn't want to see for miles.  I didn't want to peer into a telescope and spot the highway in the distance, the farms on the periphery, the birds in formation.  I wanted to stand at the base of the bird tower and crane my neck toward Chris and Hannah, bathed in the sunlight, golden.  Love was foolish and inevitable.  We were just waiting to be shattered by it.  The days were finite, full of awe."
This quote is Isabel thinking about a day she and her young family are on an adventure together, before her world seems to fall apart.

There is a wonderful tension through out the book that keeps the reader engaged as you think about what the big reveal will be a the end.  Josie, Isabel's best friend has died but there is both an uncertainty about the death and how she lived the end of her life.   Isabel is both devastated about loosing her friend and feeling guilty that she may have played a part in its inevitability.  She cannot get past this horrible event and it starts to affect her interactions with her daughter and her husband.     It pulls her marriage apart and her husband and daughter draw closer together.  Her daughter starts to feel about her the same way she had resented her mother as a child.

Interestingly Isabel and her own mother, Helene have had a difficult interaction her whole life because her mother suffered through the Holocaust.  As a survivor her mother was withdrawn emotionally.  Author, Fox, shows the similarities between these two loses and their reactions to the lose.  the idea of living your life not knowing how it can be torn apart, not being able to foresee what
is just around the corner.

But most of us are able to see both sides of the picture.  We are able to live through horrific events in our lives and move through them, through the depression and sadness and come out the other side and enjoy life again.  That I think is the message of this novel.  Knowing how to navigate the hardness and regain our positive attitude that keep our equilibrium.