Soulmates
A Novel
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3.3 • 13 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"For anyone who has ever suspected something sinister lurking behind the craze of new-age spirituality, Jessica Grose has crafted just the tale for you. With the delicious bite of satire and the page-turning satisfaction of a thriller, Soulmates is a deeply compelling, funny and sharply observed look at just how far we will go to achieve inner peace."—Lena Dunham
A clever, timely novel about a marriage, and infidelity, the meaning of true spirituality, perception and reality from the author of Sad Desk Salad, in which a scorned ex-wife tries to puzzle out the pieces of her husband’s mysterious death at a yoga retreat and their life together.
It’s been two years since the divorce, and Dana has moved on. She’s killing it at her law firm, she’s never looked better, thanks to all those healthy meals she cooks, and she’s thrown away Ethan’s ratty old plaid recliner. She hardly thinks about her husband—ex-husband—anymore, or about how the man she’d known since college ran away to the Southwest with a yoga instructor, spouting spiritual claptrap that Dana still can’t comprehend.
But when she sees Ethan’s picture splashed across the front page of the New York Post—"Nama-Slay: Yoga Couple Found Dead in New Mexico Cave"—Dana discovers she hasn’t fully let go of Ethan or the past. The article implies that it was a murder-suicide, and Ethan’s to blame. How could the man she once loved so deeply be a killer? Restless to find answers that might help her finally to let go, Dana begins to dig into the mystery surrounding Ethan’s death. Sifting through the clues of his life, Dana finds herself back in the last years of their marriage . . . and discovers that their relationship—like Ethan’s death—wasn’t what it appeared to be.
A novel of marriage, meditation, and all the spaces in between, Soulmates is a page-turning mystery, a delicious satire of our feel-good spiritual culture, and a nuanced look at contemporary relationships by one of the sharpest writers working today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The disappointing second novel by the author of Sad Desk Salad starts off as a sharp, well-populated satire and then devolves into a horror tale bogged down with unlikely coincidences. Spunky attorney Dana is finally on the brink of recovering from her husband, Ethan, leaving her for fellow yoga enthusiast Amaya five years before. She's horrified to see Ethan and Amaya's pictures on the front of the New York Post under the headline "Nama-Slay: Yoga Couple Found Dead in New Mexico Cave." At the request of a sheriff on the scene, she heads down to the Zuni Retreat where they taught in hopes of discovering what really happened and uncovering the secrets of the retreat's leader, the darkly mysterious Lama Yoni. Her encounters there give Grose the opportunity for some pointed if good-natured observations on aging hippies and "lululemonites." But once Dana discovers a perhaps too conveniently placed booklet by Ethan about his initiation into the secret levels of Lama Yoni's cult, the tone of the novel shifts precipitously from lighthearted fun to murky drama, and the plot twists in ways that wouldn't be out of place in a soap opera. Even more wrenching is the personality transplant that Dana undergoes in service of the plot.
