So Much Love
-
-
4.8 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year
Olive Kitteridge meets Room and The Lovely Bones in this stunning first novel about the unexpected reverberations the abduction of a young woman has on a small community.
When Catherine Reindeer mysteriously vanishes from the parking lot outside the restaurant where she works, an entire community is shattered. Her fellow waitress now sees danger all around her. Her mother desperately seeks comfort in saying her name over and over again. Her professor thinks of her obsessively. Her husband refuses to give up hope that she will one day come home. As we move back and forth between those who knew Catherine intimately and those who barely knew her at all, So Much Love reveals how an unexpected disappearance can overturn everything for those left behind.
But at the heart of the novel is Catherine's own surprising journey of resilience and recovery. When, after months of unimaginable horror, a final devastating loss forces her to make a bold decision, she is unprepared for everything that follows. Woven throughout Catherine's story are glimpses of a local poet who was murdered decades earlier, a woman whose work becomes a lifeline for Catherine during her darkest hours.
A riveting novel that explores the complexity of love and the power of stories to shape our lives, So Much Love confirms Rebecca Rosenblum's reputation as one of the most gifted and distinctive writers of her generation.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’ve ever been unable to tear yourself away from a horrific news story, we bet you’ll feel the same way about this thriller. While there’s no shortage of mysteries revolving around missing women, Rebecca Rosenblum’s novel never trades on shock value; instead she explores the daily realities of people affected by this kind of tragedy. Rosenblum is a talented short-story writer, and it shows in how her alternating-perspective chapters give you exactly as much info as you need …and not a morsel more. So Much Love is one powerful debut novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This strong debut novel from Rosenblum (who has previously published short fiction collections, including The Big Dream) belongs partly to a recent cluster of captive narratives such as Emma Donoghue's Room and the television series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but it has a much broader perspective than either of those, observing the effects of kidnapping as they ripple out to people close to the captives and to the wider community. A teenage boy named Donny goes missing in a small town. Catherine Reindeer, a waitress who lives in the same town but doesn't know him, is oddly preoccupied by thoughts of his fate. One night she is abducted as she leaves the restaurant where she works. This is a broad canvas of a novel that takes in the beautiful mundanity of pre-abduction life, the relentless terror of captivity, and the numb trauma Catherine feels as she tries to adjust to life outside once she is free again. Told from the points of view of multiple characters close to both Catherine and Donny, and Catherine herself, Catherine's story is interwoven with that of a poet she was studying in an undergraduate English lit class and whose life has many parallels with Catherine's. The novel is a delicate exploration of the lasting repercussions of the cruelty humans inflict on one another.
