A fantastical, fanatical escape from reality (nameless town and mountain retreat 100 miles away; present-day and replica of a late 1970s setting): If you had all the money in the world, what would you do with it?

Thirty-six-year-old Bonnie Lincoln, who lives alone in a trailer park, has “longed for something more, something extraordinary.” So when she wins a jackpot lottery, she knows exactly how she’ll spend it.

At long last, through sheer luck, Bonnie’s fantasy to transform her life and adopt a new identity has come true. A random event breaks the luckless cycle of her life. For someone who’s wondered “What decides a life?” and what “determines one’s identity?”, finally she has the power to control the answers to those fundamental life questions.

What’s her fantasy? “To crawl into Three’s Company and live there” – literally. Obsessed with the hugely popular, influential sitcom that aired on ABC for eight years, from 1977 to 1984, Bonnie actually wants to recreate the set and assume the identities of the three starring roommates of the show, all comedians:

• Handsome, charming, clumsy John Ritter who played Jack Tripper, and shocked fans when he died suddenly at 54;
• Sexy Suzanne Somers who played the stereotypical dumb blond-bombshell Chrissy Snow; and 
• Cute, dark-haired bobbed Joyce Dewitt as Janet Wood, the most practical of the bunch.

(You can watch the show for free on Pluto TV.)

The utterly imaginative plot of terribly lonesome Bonnie wanting to wrap herself up in the nostalgia of a mad cap comedy featuring three single, good-natured, and good-humored friends is an awfully appealing plot. For about a third of the novel, it absurdly is.

Ashley Hutson makes her splashing debut in what turns out to be an emotional and psychological tsunami – the last third of the novel. The middle third is the transition from Bonnie’s small, downtrodden world to an artificial, fake reality. Hutson may have watched all 170+ episodes of the TV show to so meticulously depict, down to every minute detail, Apartment 201 where Jack, Chrissy, and Janet lived together (and more), to have enabled Bonnie to slip into a surreal world she funded and had built, replicated with off-the-charts authenticity to allow her to forget her reality.

It’s hard to pinpoint when Bonnie crosses the line from starry-eyed, nonsensical to eccentric to crazed, because her descent doesn’t happen overnight and Hutson moves us back-and-forth in time and place so we’re not focused on her losing touch with reality compared to entertaining us with clever prose and impressive details that seduce us. By the time we realize what’s going on, that the enchanted plot gets darker and darker, that talented Hutson has a more complicated literary mindset than the light-hearted, humorous one we thought we were reading, we’re hooked, riveted, no turning back.

So, this review comes with a warning. Given all that Bonnie has lost, which we learn early on, it seemed perfectly reasonable she’d find a healthy escape from her traumatic life by binge-watching a wonderfully funny and cheerful TV show that let her escape from the unrelenting boredom of spending twelve years of her life working at a mom-and-pop store that could be anywhere in small-town America. We’re glad to see Bonnie has moved on from two traumatic losses early in her life: the death of both of her parents, each to self-destructive behaviors, one after another.

Bonnie doesn’t have any siblings. Her childhood friend Krystal is like the sister she’s never had, loyal and caring, whereas Bonnie is aware she vacillates in “passive aggression” towards the only friend she has. It’s Bonnie’s parents who own the grocery mart she works at, having felt feeling sorry for her plight in life, going further, welcoming her into their family that includes Krystal’s brother. Descriptions of their Christmas celebrations all together are the dreamy Hallmark kind, complete with a “Christmas village” and all the holiday trimmings. Bonnie now has a happy family to love, unlike hers, until tragedy strikes again. In the aftermath, Bonnie keeps pushing Krystal away. At what point does Bonnie stop trusting anyone?

Bonnie is more troubled than we thought. Hutson does a brilliant job depicting the disintegration of her fragile, traumatized, mental state. The accumulation of grief, loneliness, insecurity, and longing rages underneath. We bear witness to Bonnie’s unraveling into madness. Even so, we’re caught off guard at how far gone she is.

Hutson is after a larger message than what happens to the deeply disturbed character she’s created. She’s reflecting what’s happening in America: disintegration as it relates to the mental health crisis and the surge in violence. This is fiction that tells us is we cannot fix deep-seated societal problems without understanding the depths from where they come. Although the novel turns out to be so different than expected, Hutson has her pulse on this phenomenon. 

In an interview, the author sums up how her novel went from humorous to depressing:

“Humor both tempers and reinforces despair. Humor is something that should lift us up, but when it turns to cynicism about our reality it often puts us back down lower than where we started.” 

Another interview enlightens us more. “I like being disturbed,” she says when asked about her reading preferences. In accomplishing what the author set out to do, she disturbs us for a higher purpose: to provoke us so we can ponder how we might contribute to altering the trajectory that’s been defining and disturbing America. We feel sad because what’s happening in fiction is imitating the unspeakable sadness of countless people feeling left out, abandoned, helpless, and scared so they end up resorting to violent acts against themselves, their families, and strangers, young and old. Bonnie didn’t feel safe anywhere so she went about creating a self-enclosed bunker of sorts where no one could hurt her, nor find her. Even Krystal has no idea what she’s been planning, or where.

To make the impossible possible, Bonnie stealthily contracts a lawyer and fifty-men to construct her fantasy in the mountains, also in an undisclosed location. The hoops she makes people go through to execute her wild plans and the way she treats them, the kinder getting the worst treatment, is harsh, cruel. Despite knowing how far people will go for money, it still amazes and pains us.

Although Bonnie has been through a lot to no fault of her own, we’ve lost our empathy for her. We don’t have to like a character to recognize the potency of her invention. We don’t have to like her in the same way we don’t like what’s happening in America to Americans, but we ought to care and recognize how far off we’ve come from our “better angels.”

Bonnie’s story could be set almost anywhere, although the setting feels more eastern mountains than western. Perhaps because the author lives in Maryland and it doesn’t feel anywhere near Santa Monica, where Three’s Company was filmed.

When does trauma and despair cross into a mental disorder? As Bonnie’s fury against humanity deepens, we’re diagnosing her. Schizophrenia? Multiple personality disorder? Post-traumatic disorder? All the reader knows is that she’s become seriously unhinged.

Bonnie Franklin is one of the most distrustful, fearful, disturbed, and loneliest characters we’ve met fictionally. Well, at least reviewed here.

Lorraine

What happens to traumatized people years after their catastrophic stories were reported on TV news? (NJ/NYC beat & New Orleans; 2000 to 2021): More After The Break reads like a riveting and emotionally stirring collection of short stories. Except these stories are so real you wish they were fiction.

Of the “ten thousand” people Emmy-award winning journalist Jen Maxfield interviewed for TV, chosen from “four thousand stories” spanning twenty-two years, ten are revisited in this compassionate, groundbreaking book. Each breathtaking, and delicate in reaching out to people she’d been thrown-together with amidst horrific circumstances.

How many reporters dare to re-open doors not knowing what “chaos and sadness” they might be stepping back into? “We dip our toes in the pool of your grief but never jump in for fear of drowning.”

Maxfield’s commitment to the highest ideals of journalism shines, so it’s not surprising she now teaches broadcast journalism at her alma mater, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Keenly aware the afflicted person at the center of the story always comes first, despite the rush to get the story, the author’s warmth, honesty, respectfulness, and graciousness offers comfort to the darkness. Humbly though, she asks: “What can I offer”? Answering with, “The space to tell their story.”

Tracking down people met in crisis years ago is the easy part thanks to technology she says, but there’s nothing easy about these stories. The reward, which the reader perceives, is that she “could not have predicted how much these reunions would enrich my life with joy and optimism.”

Maxfield’s gratitude is also refreshing. Grateful for the extraordinary “emotional intimacy within minutes” granted whenever interviewing/intruding on someone in his/her most vulnerable, naked state; the cameramen (no female photographers in these stories) who stood beside her so she never felt “alone”; and being cocooned in the “live truck” with her crew preparing to transition from reality into the surreal.

How does a journalist find balance in their life stepping outside their world to the unknown abyss? For Maxfield that means getting the urgent call, having to drop everything to race out the door, leaving her family – husband and three children, young during her coverage of these stories – to be consumed by nightmare stories working up to sixteen hours a day. These ten stories are staggering in terms of human trauma, which makes the idea for and realization of this book high-stakes and notable.

More After The Break comes at a crucial time when the public’s trust in the media has reached alarmingly low rates. If only wide readership of this book could reverse the trend, by witnessing serious journalists/reporters/anchors do their upmost to maintain the principles and ethics of the Fourth Estate.

Maxfield wonders whether the people she contacts will even remember her. Although trauma can wipe out memories, we understand why no one forgets the genuinely empathetic newswoman.

Having cut her teeth at two local upstate New York TV stations, Maxfield worked at Eyewitness News on ABC7 New York for ten years; since 2013 she’s covered the news for NBC4New York. Her real start she describes came in graduate school, making a documentary for her thesis. This story saved for the last, perhaps to sum up two decades worth of lessons learned.

Bergen County, New Jersey is the author’s home. So while she covers local and NYC news stories, one is included reliving being called upon to cover Hurricane Katrina a day after it devastated Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Twenty-eight at the time, it was the most “high profiled” and “massive” story of her career. It shatters any notions you might have that TV news reporting during catastrophes is to be envied. Lives are reduced to the absolute minimum of basic needs – drinking water, coffee, bathrooms, and gas for the vehicle. Still, enviable compared to the disaster.

“TV news reporting is not a glamourous job, but its purpose is lofty. Spotlighting the people who represent the best in human nature helps our viewers see beyond the despair of the situation, and it gives us all hope.”

Perhaps another journalist could have written this book as beautifully. But not with the same sensitive and compassionate prose reflecting Maxfield’s laudatory approach to her profession.

We don’t know the people in these stories. Nor the disasters that hit them, with the exception of Hurricane Katrina and perhaps the “60,000-pound ferry” that crashed into a Staten Island pier. “Angel on the Ferry” opens the collection, maybe because it’s the most awe-inspiring, though there’s plenty of competition. The victim interviewed was twenty-four at the time, a NYC waiter who didn’t earn much money on his way home. Also interviewed was the heroine nurse who saved his life, opportunely vacationing from Wales. Could Maxfield have been as courageous? she reflects. It does take a different type of courage to re-enter Paul Esposito’s life, not knowing what kind of physical and mental condition she’d find him in after losing both of his legs. His words and mental attitude, like the book’s title, are unforgettable. “The ferry crash was the start of a new chapter” he says, in which he “takes nothing for granted and savors the beauty of every day.” Is this the definition of Grace?

“A Daughter’s Love” is a survival story on two fronts that will take your breath away. How did Tamika Tompkins, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, one a newborn, survive being stabbed twenty-seven-times (!) by her ex-boyfriend? Wait, there’s more! How did her two-year-old daughter have the wherewithal to jump on top of her bleeding mother stopping her from bleeding to death? Stunning what even the very youngest of children are capable of. A stark warning that adults need to pay closer attention to what they say and how they behave in front of their impressionable kids who hear and observe far more than they’re given credit for.

The “Friday Night” story about a twenty-three-year-old animal lover Tiffany is achingly sad. Her life cut short by an intoxicated hit-and-run driver while she was trying to save a dog lying in the street also hit by a car. Sadness turns to outrage when we learn how just justice is. If the perpetrator had moral convictions – stayed at the scene of the crime as legally required – a jury would likely have found him drunk and guilty, imprisoned for maybe as much as twenty years (NJ law). But who can prove how much alcohol is in your system when you’ve run away? Seven years in jail for erasing a life is an indignation, but what do you call getting out of prison on parole in six months?

Obviously, there’s more stories in this moving collection. Each strike at the randomness and fairness of life. And, how some people do care deeply about that.

Lorraine

How one woman tells us so much about Freedom, Feminism, and Environmental Stewardship (Fellowship Point, imaginary haven on the coast of Maine. Also Philadelphia and NYC’s Village, 2000 – 2008; backstory early 1960s): Fellowship Point reads and feels like a literary masterpiece. One of the most satisfying novels I’ve ever read.

Elegantly written with such welcoming prose and soothing broad-mindedness, nearing 600 pages and you’ll still wish it never ends. Because you’ll lose yourself in, dwell in, the highly-principled and independent world of eighty-year-old Agnes Lee.

Envisioned twenty-years ago, ten years in the writing, Alice Elliott Dark couldn’t have imagined how much her bighearted feminist novel – entwined with her best friend Polly she grew up with in Philadelphia, also eighty – would mean to so many of us when a woman’s freedom to choose the direction of her life has been torn asunder. Although Agnes will swear, “I never realized I was a feminist. I realized I was a person, a human being, with desires and needs and talents and abilities – the same as everyone else.”

The thing is Agnes isn’t like everyone else. A contrarian who marches to her own beat, she might intimidate you at first, until you get to know her and are struck by how deeply she cares about the existential things in life; her friendships, never wanting to “lose sight of the good people;” and the beauty and bounty of Nature – her “serenity.” Dark wants us to know Agnes as well as she does. The wholly unorthodox Aunt we wish we had, or if you’re really lucky, cherish.

As a fourth-generation Quaker from the city of Liberty and Love, Dark’s second novel is a literary work of art, embodying the spiritual values of a movement that believes in Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. Agnes lives and breathes this moral code and philosophy without being religious at all. Hear these values described below:

“What makes you happy?” “What is free will?” “Or freedom?” “Or will?” “What is a soul mate?” we’re asked. So when Agnes wonders, “Who cares about an old lady?” you’ll want to shout out that you do! She has so much to tell us about how to live your life on your terms. How to celebrate the complexities of life with all the grace and dignity you can muster. To care about “making the world kinder.” To be honest with yourself and the actions of others. How to survive unbearable sorrow. To not give up even when the odds seem hopeless. To value “sticking up for yourself,” and others. To give and love as much as you can but not expect the same in return, although if reciprocated, maybe not the way you expected, it’s still beautiful.

Agnes and Polly have chosen very different destinies mostly because their personalities are very different. Agnes chose singlehood; Polly marriage, motherhood, and now reaping the joys of grandparenthood. Polly knows Agnes doesn’t care much for her self-absorbed husband, Dick, and how Polly is so “cowed” to him. Agnes tells it right. You won’t like him either. Nor her eldest of three sons, James, an investment banker, who presents a significant roadblock to the environmental cause, activism, and sensitivities Agnes’ possesses and pays homage to.

For 150 years, her ancestors managed to protect a fictional spit of land on the coast of Maine named Fellowship Point. A “hallowed thirty-five acre tip on the peninsula” nicknamed the Sank, short for Sanctuary. Preserved by a fellowship of five friends and their families, today it’s in grave jeopardy as not all five current members have the same conservancy agenda. Agnes is dogged in this pursuit, but Polly is torn between her allegiance to her and her three children. 

Agnes epitomizes the best of what it means to fully embrace a “personal religion of sisterhood with trees, flowers, birds, squirrels, rocks, and even snakes.” A laudatory theme about caring for the environment like we should care about people.

The other threat is ageist attitudes towards Polly by her children, and Agnes’ diagnosis of cancer, which we learn of early on. Do not assume Agnes’ fate is sealed because she has a lot of living to do! When she asks, “How do you achieve enlightenment?” she’s letting us know she’s far more enlightened than most of us. Her tale of all-embracing fellowship shows the “upsides and downsides” of how she achieved that. 

Agnes celebrates the best we can be even if our lives turned out not to be as we hoped. “What are you grateful for?” she asks. She’s “grateful for another day, for writing and for the sea.” A beloved children’s author of the When Nan series. When another female character enters her self-determined life early on in the novel, a persistent one who doesn’t give up – twenty-seven-year-old editorial assistant Maud Silver who works at the publishing house that’s produced “dozens” of the When Nan books – she’s curious who Nan is and how she understands children so well when she’s never had a child of her own. As Nan’s profoundly moving story rolls out, along with the charming, developing relationship between young and old, we see the dramatic meaning of sisterhood and motherhood.

Agnes isn’t afraid to speak her mind yet she’s kept some secrets even from Polly, despite not being able to “quantify” how much Polly’s friendship has meant to her over the course of her life. There’s other meaningful female relationships too: Agnes’ younger sister, Elspeth, whom we meet through her loving diary-like letters and notebooks, diverting from the 3^rd person narrative; and her loyal, long-time, gatekeeper/housekeeper Sylvie. (The Lees were wealthy but it was “bad manners” to be showy). Agnes also has male relationships that matter too, some heartening, heartbreaking, and vexing.

Opening with a handy imaginary map of the Maine coastal area, on the west side you’ll see Agnes’ Leeward Cottage, Polly’s Meadowlea next door, and a shared graveyard that keeps the spirits of those they’ve loved and lost near. Archie Lee, Agnes’ cousin, lives south of Polly at Westerlee with his wife who offends Agnes’ values. They also own a flamboyant mansion on the eastern side, Easterlee, which overuses the region’s distinctive granite rock with pink coloring. This dislikable duo commit and enable a terrible injustice towards Agnes and Polly’s mutual friend Richard Circumstance, who they defend staunchly.

Armchair atmospheric, this is the “boom of the ocean” Maine, with its “mossy forest floor, the dun-colored needles, the expressive tree bark, this slowed-down world.” The place where Agnes “felt – free.” Freedom is what Agnes exemplifies.

Caring for both the land and the Abenaki Indigenous tribe who settled on it before anyone else, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust is cited since it represents the preservation vision Agnes has for Fellowship Point. An environmental activist’s message from an author who spent summers in Maine. 

Agnes is also the one who brings us so much nostalgia. She affects us when she asks why girls who “giggled” and felt “blasts of joy” ceased “playing and running?” when “we loved it so much.”

Like Maine, Fellowship Point is a state of mind. Agnes’ state of mind will live in our hearts and minds for a long time. That’s why this novel is a masterpiece.

Lorraine

Gentrification – what it feels like and does (Upper Manhattan, 2015-ish): Fifteen years in the making and it shows. You will not be able to put Neruda on the Park down.

Fifteen years to establish Cleyvis Natera’s fantastical goal, stated in her Acknowledgements: to “let our stories change the world with the power and beauty of our imagination.” Fifteen years to imagine an exquisite, fiery immigrant’s tale reflecting the realities of how Natera and her Dominican Republic family “survived” the “immeasurable pain, loss, joy, and love as immigrants in the United States.”

Immigrants who carved out a new home in the one city in the world that has more Dominicans than anywhere else outside of their Caribbean island homeland – New York City. Specifically, in the upper reaches of Manhattan near Washington Heights, dubbed “Little Dominican Republic,” north of Harlem, in the area where the author grew up since age ten.

Fifteen years pouring her literary heart and soul into a place, its people, community, and culture inventing a neighborhood – Nothar Park – and two unforgettable characters: twenty-nine-year-old, Ivy-league educated lawyer Luz Guerrero, and her mother Eusebia, the loving force behind her. Calm father Vladimir loves his family too, a policeman on a manhunt upstate so he’s gone during much of what heats up between mother-and-daughter. Growing tensions on several bombshell fronts frame the gentrification plot: what it means to be told to “Go Home” in more ways than one. How the color of your skin influences and energizes, good and bad, who you are, aspire to be, and who you become.

The best way to describe how this high-spirited novel reads is to imagine you’re on a train that feels like it’s going too fast along the subway tracks of NYC. Three major events have converged, so you’re aware it’s not going to stop at your destination, acting like it has a mind of its own. In this scenario, three minds going in different directions. Luz and Eusebia on the verge of breaking ranks in terms of where they want to go, though neither knows where their destinies lie. Luz has felt a floating “emptiness” and “loneliness” for a while; Eusebia has newly decided if no one else is going to stand up, she will. The third mind is far more powerful: the developer determined to execute his fantasy. Bigger than any urban project ever built.

You’re in the hands of the driver of the train – the author – who’s had plenty of time to decide and command her train how far she wants to take it. The atmosphere inside the train is filled with the voices, love, passions, yearnings, struggles, sacrifices, and pride of passengers who’ve come to America from the same impoverished Dominican country for the same reasons: to make a better life for themselves and their loves ones. They include neighbors and friends, who like the Guerrero family, brought reminders and symbols of Home with them: rhythmic, genre music and dance (Meringue, Salsa, Bachata, Son); sweet, spicy foods (habichiuelas con dulce, pollo guisao, pasteles) that can take hours to prepare out of love; and their nation’s blue-white-and-red flags hung on windows and draped over the fire escapes of their brownstone apartments.

Everyone on this train is in it together, so they’ll be embroiled in the fires the Guerrero family ignites (Eusebia), wants to put out (Lutz), while Vladimir (supported by Luz) has been working on an entirely different plan – dreamy – kept secret from the one person who desperately needs to be told.

The train hasn’t moved when the novel opens, but its rumbling. The noise is louder than what you’ve grown accustomed to hearing in one of the noisiest cities in the world. The “wrecking ball” described in Chapter One, subtitled, “White Out, Washed Out,” prophetically announces the set-up.

Gentrification: a fancy word that means forcing out the urban poor to make room for the wealthier and privileged.

The piercing sounds of the “demolition” – “the sound of split wooden frames, shattered glass windows, and fractured brownstone” – are the thunderbolt that marks the onslaught of lives turning on a dime. Profoundly expressed in one of the two quotes in the epigraph:

Selecting words from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem “How Much Happens in a Day” – his “Love Poems” meaningfully popping up elsewhere in the novel and obviously inspiration for the title – speaks to Natera’s boldness. Well-aware the legacy of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 for “poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams” has been tainted by his own admission of rape, she doesn’t shy away from his prescient words. Instead, she crafts a stirring commentary about what can happen so quickly when people feel utterly powerless even when they’ve played by the rules. For the Guerrero family, that’s twenty years making NYC their home.

Aimed at provoking the economic, social, and cultural forces that have sought to oppress the Latinx community spectacularly, gentrification at the center of this storm is spectacularly real. Because today sitting across the street from fictional Nothar Park is the behemoth development called Hudson Yards, which broke ground after 9/11, finished in 2019.

You’ll hear that “wrecking ball” in all three Parts of the novel – “Demolition,” “Excavation,” and “Grounding.” The erasure of yet another NYC ethnic community starting with the richly diverse Lower East Side, Nothar Park is the last in Manhattan. The Yards represent the epitome of what happens when you have billions and don’t care about destroying lives and the soul of what once made the city magnificent, bursting with color and character. 

The author pays tribute to her own mother in the second quote in the inscription:

“Remember – you are trunk, not a branch”

(Regina “Masona” Lucas)

Remember it as Luz’s story evolves. Opening when Luz is exuberant, headed to meet her elder Latino role-model/mentor at the law firm she’s devoted seventy hours a week to for five years. At the so-called Special Place restaurant, she orders champagne for breakfast anticipating her heads-up on becoming partner. Only to find out she’s actually going to be let go! Even though she’s done everything right. Shocked and humiliated when her estranged, childhood best friend Angelica overhears the conversation waitressing at said private spot, spreading the news to her mother’s bingo-playing neighborhood close friends called The Tongues because they’re so gossipy. Her devastating secret is out, but Luz hopes Eusebia doesn’t find out until she finds the right time to tell her. The tension between former best friends who chose different paths after high school is thick; Angelica is part of the neighborhood, so the two bump into each other. When she asks Luz if she thought she was fired because of discrimination, initially Luz denies the possibility. Why?

Around the same time, Eusebia has an accident with consequences felt throughout. You’ll think you’ve figured out her problem. You’ll guess wrong. Combined with the backdrop of a violent act towards one of their precious, young own, this novel is about people and a community at the “cusp” of something monumental.

Accompanying the richness and passion of a culture, a steamy romance develops, too quickly like the other events, between Luz and a white man who embodies everything going wrong, aptly named Hudson. Their relationship burns brightly too, but we sense something isn’t going in the right direction as well.

Don’t stand on the noisy platform when this train arrives. Hop on. Take the ride. Because it’s going someplace you’ve likely never been before.

Lorraine