kirkusreviews.com
A story of sex abuse and its aftermath from the author of My
Liar 2008) and What to Keep (2004).
It’s 2009, and Nora Buchbinder is stranded in middle age with a
dead mother, a missing cat, and a magnificent apartment she can neither afford
to furnish nor legally sell. She’s just given up the freelance life and taken a
desk job with the New York Education Department because she wants health
insurance. The work is tedious—until the case of a predatory teacher takes her
back to her own experience at a private girls’ school in the 1970s. Like so
many women of her generation, Nora struggles to reconcile her adolescent
feelings about sexual freedom with what she knows now about consent and power.
Then she learns that the teacher whose case she’s handling is being represented
by Beth, her former best friend and a favorite of their own eighth-grade
instructor, Bob Rasmussen….A full reckoning with the past and what it means in
the present is inevitable. Nora is a beautifully crafted character. Late in the
book, she comments on her own “prickliness,” and the word is perfect. Nora is
sharp and hard to get close to, and now, in her 50s, she’s trying to understand
how much of that is a reaction to Mr. Rasmussen—his behavior toward Nora but
also what she knows about him and Beth and a handful of other girls. Her story
is interwoven with emails written by Rasmussen himself as well as beyond-the-grave
narration from Rasmussen’s wife, Naomi. These portions of the book are less
successful. Bob Rasmussen is a creep, and not a terribly repentant one. His
self-justifications aren’t especially revelatory; they’re just gross. Naomi is
slightly more interesting, but Cline has granted her an omniscience—because
she’s dead?—that feels a bit like cheating.
An uneven exploration of a timely topic.
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