by Dana Spiotta
First published 2021
Samantha Raymond lies awake during "the Mids," those sleepless hours between three and four AM when women her age confront mortality and motherhood. At fifty-two, she watches her mother's health decline while her teenage daughter grows distant. The country feels like it's falling apart, and so does her carefully constructed suburban existence. When Samantha discovers a beautiful but decaying house in a rough Syracuse neighborhood, she buys it impulsively and leaves her family behind. In this new space, she wrestles with the competing demands of being a wife, mother, and daughter in an America that seems to be unraveling. Her escape becomes a reckoning with her own body, her relationships, and her place in a world gone mad. Spiotta crafts a story that examines what happens when middle-aged women refuse to stay put, exploring the messy complexity of female desire and discontent in contemporary America.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: reckoning, self-discovery
Setting: Syracuse
Period: 21st-century
384 pages · Paperback · Random House Large Print
Content warnings: mental-illness