Private Way
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 Nebraska Book Award
In 2015, when cyberbullies disrupt her life in Southern California, Vivi Marx decides to cut her cord with the internet and take her life offline for a year. She flees to the one place where she felt safe as a child—with her grandmother in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nevermind that her grandmother is long dead and she doesn’t know anyone else in the state. Even before she meets her new neighbors on Fieldcrest Drive, Vivi knows she’s made a terrible mistake, but every plan she makes to leave is foiled. Despite her efforts to outrun it, trouble follows her to Nebraska, just not in the ways she’d feared. With the help of her neighbors, Willa Cather’s novels, and her own imagination, Vivi finds something she hadn’t known she was searching for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The frustrating latest from Randolph (Leaving the Pink House) focuses on a young internet maven who is silenced by cyberbullies. Vivi Marx flees her comfortable life in the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A., turning her back on her company and best friend, to spend a year offline in Lincoln, Neb., a place that holds happy memories of her late grandmother. She rents a small cottage and tries to come to terms with her fears, boredom, and lack of direction. Vivi starts reading old Willa Cather novels that had been left in her cottage, then befriends a man named Ivan, unbelievably a descendant of a woman Cather wrote about. Another strange detail involves the suggestion that the cottage is haunted by the ghost of a gardener who previously lived there. Along the way, Vivi learns how to connect with people in real life, beginning with a neighboring family, and bonds with an abused dog named Bill. Though the physical descriptions of Nebraska are well wrought and there are some poignant emotional moments, there are too many unresolved plot points (is there a ghost? What about the dog?). In the end, this feels unconvincing.
