Author: Jennifer Graham

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley, 432 pages)

Cracking open a new Emily Henry novel is like settling into a beach chair, soaking up the warmth of the sun as you sink your feet into the cool sand and savor the moment of calm, unbothered bliss. And then it’s better than that, knowing you’ll be in this state of bliss for as long as the story lasts, rather than for a few minutes before the sun gets too hot and you start sweating and wishing you’d brought an umbrella.

That’s the experience I’ve had with all of Henry’s novels, and Great Big Beautiful Life was no exception — at first. That initial feeling of euphoria was real; as always, Henry’s engaging writing drew me right in and I was totally on board with the story, of two writers vying for a job to write the biography of a reclusive heiress who disappeared years ago following a series of tragedies and a lifetime of public scrutiny.

I love the premise. I’m a fan of the novel’s protagonist, Alice, a serial optimist, and her rival/love interest, Hayden, a serial pessimist. I even liked Margaret Ives, the mysterious octogenarian heiress.

So I was all in, at first, for Henry’s departure from her typical rom-com. But then the sun got too hot, so to speak. Because just as Alice and Hayden’s romance starts to heat up, Margaret’s telling of her “juicy” life story takes over and the focus shifts to her extensive family history.

And I do mean extensive. Even Alice notes some frustration when Margaret starts her story several generations back, rather than diving into the more recent past.

I already don’t love the story-within-a-story framework, because I almost always like one story more and feel antsy when I’m reading the “other” story, waiting to get back to the good stuff. In this case, I was by far more interested in Alice and Hayden. I loved their interactions and wanted more of them, to watch their relationship develop more explicitly.

Margaret’s family’s decades of secrets and deceptions? I really wanted to care, but it all felt so convoluted. I kept forgetting who was related to whom and in what way. And the element of mystery that permeates the Ives’ family history, that presumably the general public cares enough about to read a Margaret Ives biography, isn’t all that exciting.

I was hoping when we got to Margaret’s hyped-up romance with another briefly famous person, Cosmo, there would be similar vibes to Alice and Hayden’s story. But even that fell flat for me.

I truly believe that the cover of Great Big Beautiful Life is a disservice to what the novel actually is: more “women’s fiction” than rom-com. Every time I picked the book up, I could not align the cover image with the words inside — but only if I was on a Margaret chapter. The Alice/Hayden plot fit the cover perfectly. It’s like Henry wanted to try something more serious but also didn’t want to let go of the genre she does best, ultimately creating a disjointed reading experience.

All that being said, Emily Henry’s writing is so lovely, and I appreciate her attempt to step out of her comfort zone. I can’t help wondering, if Henry had written a book solely about the Ives family — and marketed it accurately, as women’s fiction rather than a rom-com — whether I would have been more invested, knowing that I’d be reading a historical family saga.

Likewise, I think Alice and Hayden’s story has more to offer, both their relationship and their individual stories. Alice as a character is refreshing in that she is so positive in a way that could be annoying but somehow is not. Hayden is the grumpy male character that’s been written plenty of times before, but there’s something about him that seems sincere from the beginning and more real than the average grump-turned-lover rom-com character. They also both have intriguing pasts that could have used more fleshing out.

Great Big Beautiful Life is two mostly good stories that just don’t mesh well. But it’s still worth the read. Henry’s writing is a warm hug, no matter what she’s writing about, so as long as you’re not expecting straight-up rom-com vibes, this is a few hours well spent. B —Meghan Siegler

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick (Avid Reader Press, 289 pages)

It is challenging to approach Bill Belichick’s new book on its literary merits, considering all the news coverage given its publicity tour (sample from the Washington Post: “Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson and the making of a PR disaster”). There is also the matter of the acknowledgments.

Let’s just say that when the author thanks 4½ pages of people, and the media focuses on one person he does not thank, it’s fair to wonder if anyone is interested in the actual book, except for maybe Tom Brady, who promises in a cover blurb that The Art of Winning will bring out the best in all of us. And who, besides Robert Kraft, doesn’t want that?

So I began the book with an open mind, right up to the point where Belichick started yelling at me.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to, at the end of each chapter, have two pages of all-caps commands barking at the reader in white type on black pages, but it is shocking the first time you come across it, and each subsequent time it’s just annoying. (Wondering if I was overreacting, I showed a couple of pages to my college-age daughter and said, “Don’t read the words, just tell me how you react to this.” She didn’t know anything about the book or author. “Scared,” she said.)

This effect is not mitigated even when Belichick is screaming at us on the page to “TREAT PEOPLE WITH KINDNESS, RESPECT, AND DIGNITY WHENEVER YOU ARE MAKING A DECISION THAT INVOLVES THEIR LIFE OUTSIDE OF WORK.” Or “HONESTY IS GOOD. THERE IS A PLACE FOR SPEAKING SOFTLY, AND A PLACE FOR SPEAKING FORCEFULLY.”

OK, Yoda.

This is, at times, a book of platitudes, albeit platitudes written down by the winningest coach in football when he was between jobs. We were warned of that by the title, which is not especially original. (See: Amazon.)

That is not to say that there are not interesting stories in the book; there are plenty, including one involving the bromance that developed between Tom Brady and Antonio Brown when the troubled wide receiver was a New England Patriot for 13 days in 2019. Belichick reveals that AB sent TB12 a gift of bison and some sort of special milk that was $500 a bottle and was shipped in from the West. Though nobody apparently was at fault, it got left outside Brady’s locker for a night, and as Belichick tells it, on the eve of a big game, “we were all crying over spoiled milk” and management wound up reimbursing Brown $3,500.

“Think about it this way: Would you spend $3500 to ensure the best person on your team gave their best performance when it mattered most? Would you pay twice that to immediately relieve your star employee of a depressive episode, no matter how head-shaking? Absolutely, and you know it. Your job is not to psychoanalyze. Your job is to put people in a position to win.”

Anybody who followed the Patriots under Belichick for even a few years recognizes the patterns he lays out here. Practice matters. So does consistency. The process is king. (“Every day does not revolve around closing a big deal or scoring a big new client. But those days when the stakes are very high should feel exactly like every other day.”) All this is fine, and yes, might be helpful to some. There are worse self-help books out there, for sure.

It’s just we can’t help thinking, is this really all he’s got for us?

Like a Belichick press conference, even the big stories seem brusque. This is disappointing, especially when he begins with a line like “Falcons fans, you have fair warning. I’m going to talk about 28-3.”

That refers, of course, to the 2017 Super Bowl when the Falcons led by that score in the third quarter. The Pats went on to score 31 unanswered points. Surely, this will be a great story? Nope. It’s one page describing one play; then he’s on to the importance of preparation. (PREPARATION IS NEVER WASTED, REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME.)

Also, he never even tells us what animal or plant that ridiculous $500 milk came from.

He does give us some insight into the men who were influential in his life, including father Steve Belichick, who was also a football coach and a scout and passed on to his son the importance of working every day, not just to get a paycheck or even to win football games, but to improve at everything. (“Am I working toward something? Or am I just working?”)

“I suspect that the quest for improvement is not not quite so ubiquitous in the world outside sports,” Belichick writes, explaining how being laser focused on improvement is the crux of his famous phrase “On to Cincinnati,” which was uttered after a tough loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football.

To be fair, there are some parts to this book that are genuinely funny, including Belichick’s “free motivation trick” involving Rob Gronkowski: “Whenever you feel lazy, close your eyes and imagine Gronk walking into your office and swatting you aside and taking your job. What’s he doing? How hard is he doing it? Does he seem depressed to be working hard? Or did he just spike your coffee mug on your head after sending that email you were too overwhelmed to type?”

He also tells a couple of revealing Tom Brady stories, which help to explain why Brady was so magnanimous in the blurb.

The Art of Winning is insider baseball, so to speak, in that the Gronkowski story means nothing at all to anyone who knows nothing about Gronk. Many of Belichick’s stories won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t speak football, and they will appeal even less to anyone who doesn’t love the New England Patriots (meaning much of the country). As inspirational books go, even at its best, it’s self-limiting in its reach. And Jeff Benedict and Michael Holloway have written more engagingly about the Patriots.

So the greatest coach of all time (which actually remains to be seen — we’ll see how he does in North Carolina) isn’t the greatest writer of all time, nor should we expect him to be. It’s just Belichick on paper: Billy GOAT Gruff. C

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday, 301 pages)

Batavia is a small city in western New York that most people have never heard of, even if they pass it on the New York Thruway on the way to or from a vacation. Like a lot of cities its size, Batavia is remarkable mostly for its reasonably priced homes and comforting sense of community, the latter of which is often derived from sports.

In Homestand, Will Bardenwerper examines what happens when that sense of community is under threat — in Batavia’s case, when the city loses its minor-league baseball team when the MLB decides to scale down its farm teams. It’s a topic that is close to the author’s heart, his warmest childhood memories involving backyard baseball with his brother, under his grandfather’s watch, and his adult experience of being part of a tightly knit Army battalion deployed to Iraq after 9/11.

When he returned home, Bardenwerper writes, “… after those many months living as a member of a small tribe who did everything together, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the ‘real’ world looked like when I returned, face-to-face, real human interactions increasingly giving way to soulless virtual contact.”

Increasingly concerned about how disconnected Americans are becoming from each other, he was also troubled by what was happening economically, with private equity becoming more of a player in everything from housing to baseball. When Major League Baseball restructured the minor leagues in 2021, cutting 40 teams, Bardenwerper saw it through this lens: What the loss of a team would mean for a place like Batavia, where community life was heavily invested in its beloved team, the Muckdogs.

Batavia, however, didn’t go gently into a baseball-less night. It got a new team to play in Dwyer Stadium, one composed of college players who each paid $1,500 for the opportunity to sharpen their skills while enjoying an enthusiastic, ready-made fan base. Bardenwerper decided to join their ranks in the name of journalism, buying a season ticket and traveling from his home in Pennsylvania to embed himself for a season in Muckdogmania.

“I wanted to find out for myself what we, as a country, risked losing, and whether there was any chance it might be saved,” he writes.

Much of the book is structured by games: the Muckdogs versus, say, the Elmira Pioneers, the Syracuse Salt Cats, the Utica Blue Sox and, my personal favorite, Jamestown Tarp Skunks, which honestly makes me want to move to Jamestown, New York, just because, well, Tarp Skunks.

It is an interesting scaffolding for the book, which works except for the fact that, like baseball itself, this narrative lends itself to plodding. Bardenwerper takes us deep into the life of this community and its inhabitants, sometimes deeper that the reader wants to go. We are warned of this at the start of the book, when a list of “Dramatis Personae” tells us that the people we are about to meet include octogenarian season ticket holder Dr. Ross Fanara; Bob Brinks, the popcorn maker at the Elmira stadium’s concessions stand; and Ernie Lawrence, “musician, hospice volunteer, rosary maker.”

Let’s just say that by the end of Homestand you will know a lot about small towns in the Empire State and their inhabitants. And also about why baseball is so important in small-town America.

Coming together to cheer on a team, Bardenwerper writes, makes everyone’s life a bit better at the moment. “The real magic,” he says, is not happening in the diamond, no matter how exciting a game may be, but “found in the bleachers, among the fans.”

This is a romanticized notion of fandom, to be sure; sometimes fans are falling from the stands, ripping balls out of a player’s mitt, throwing things on the field. But to know and love a community is to have spent time in it and gotten to know its people through shared experiences. As a local author (and fellow season ticket holder) that Bardenwerper got to know in the stands, Bill Kauffman, wrote of Batavia, “This is such an unlovely place, yet I love it with all my heart. To visitors, it is a charmless Thruway stop on the Rust Belt’s fringe; to me, it is the stuff of myth and poetry, and of life weighed on the human scale — the only measurement that counts.”

While Homestand is a love letter to community and to baseball, it has its villains: the money counters in MLB, private equity companies that profit at the expense of ordinary Americans, and, increasingly of concern to Bardenwerper, the extraordinarily well-paid professional ballplayer.

At one event in which children with disabilities were playing ball with the Muckdogs, causing everyone around to swell with emotion, Bardenwerper started thinking about how “just a few hundred miles to the southeast, the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole would soon go to work to earn his $36 million salary. On this day he would give up nine hits and four runs in a 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.”

He notes, however, that Cole’s salary was eclipsed by the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who had signed what was then the largest MLB contract: $700 million over 10 years. (Juan Soto of the New York Mets has since signed a deal that gives him $765 million over 15 years.)

Bardenwerper acknowledges that many fans aren’t troubled by athletes making money like this, but says he has come to believe that “the extreme economic inequality personified by Major League Baseball (and all professional sports) was corrosive to a healthy society — and, for me at least, was becoming an almost insurmountable obstacle to my desire to remain a fan.”

The more he gets to know the people of Batavia and the devoted minor-league baseball fans in nearby cities —in Elmira, a man now in his 90s has been sitting in the same seat since 1974 — the more Bardenwerper is troubled by the cost-cutting decisions made by wealthy people who live far away. “Baseball,” he says, “has already begun to resemble yet another extractive industry where dollars are transferred from small towns to big-city owners and investors.”

In some ways, Homeland is a follow-up dirge to a book that Bill Kauffman wrote about Batavia in 2003, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive. For a small, unremarkable city, Batavia gets remarked upon a lot. It might yet survive, as might baseball.

The Muckdogs of 2022 can be quite a long season for the casual reader, but Homestand pays off for those who love baseball — and aren’t prone to fidgeting when the game runs long. B+ —Jennifer Graham

How to Be Well, by Amy Larocca (Knopf, 291 pages)

At some undefined point between Helen Gurley Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow, women stopped the pursuit of beauty and replaced it with the pursuit of “wellness.” Wellness is an ill-defined concept, a mixture of good health (mental and physical), good vibes and excellent self-esteem, with the goal of becoming The Best Version of You, as the parlance goes. It is a $5.5 trillion dollar industry according to the Global Wellness Institute, encompassing far more than the pursuit of beauty ever did. (Have you checked the price of collagen peptides lately?)

It is also poorly regulated, and as such, women are subject to a barrage of dubious claims about procedures and products that are said to make them ever more well, while in fact the only certainty is that they will be ever more broke.

Journalist Amy Larocca takes one for the team in How to Be Well, venturing into the wellness space with a skeptical eye and a snarky voice. It’s not a spoiler to say that she was not especially impressed with what she found, given that the subtitle of the book is “Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.” In other words, if you already have the sense that the colonics industry — which amounts to recreational irrigation of your colon — may be oversold as a life-changing procedure, if you’ve ever gone to Paltrow’s Goop website for a chuckle, you will love this book. If you are a devotee of all things Goop, it will only make you mad.

Larocca begins with a brief history of how wellness evolved. In 1979, she wrote, Dan Rather, on the TV show 60 Minutes, said “Wellness. That’s a word you don’t hear every day.” He was reporting on the Wellness Resource Center in California, and during the segment, asked clients if the idea wasn’t something akin to a “middle-class cult.” It seems prescient now, given the range of strange offerings in the genre, but it’s mostly mainstream. The wellness aisle at your drugstore, Larocca writes, may contain everything from mouthwash to lip gloss to nasal spray. Wellness also encompasses incense, apple-cider vinegar and goat yoga. “It’s a brew that has the potential to drive you nuts,” she writes.

She takes us from the Harvard-educated Dr. Andrew Weil to Dr. Frank Lipman, wellness guru to the stars, and Dr. Mark Hyman, a popular podcaster and proponent of “functional medicine,” which focuses on the root causes of illness and disease. (Lipman and Hyman, Larocca writes, “share a commitment to fascia rolling, morning sun exposure and a cold rinse at the end of a hot shower.”) She also introduces us to Robin Berzin, the founder of Parsley Health, a booming functional medicine practice with holistic doctors that sells memberships for $225 a month or $99 a month if you’re in-network. Parsley is a medical practice that presents as a spa; as with an airport lounge, members who live near a physical location in New York and Los Angeles can hang out there, even if they don’t have an appointment. The average American talks to a primary-care physician 19 minutes a year, Larocca writes, while Parsley members talk to a physician 200 minutes a year. Similar practices are rising up all over the country — but be careful, as wonderful as they may seem, Larocca notes that some of the physicians aren’t board-certified, which has long been the standard of care.

That’s only one aspect of wellness, however, which Larocca says “is every bit as much about looking better as it is about feeling better.” The essence is in the word “glow.”

“The term is so prevalent that it sometimes feels as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find ‘skinny’ and replace all with ‘strong’; find ‘beauty’ and replace all with ‘glow.’” Glowing can be achieved with exercise, with dry brushing (a kind of exfoliation), with supplements and gummies, with bone broth. There is, essentially, Larocca says, a “Glow Cinematic Universe.”

The author describes herself as a “secular atheist,” which sets her apart from the majority of Americans and also adds a certain acidic overlay when she is talking about things like prayer and meditation as part of wellness routines and fitness classes as “spiritual centers.” She believes that “the gospel of wellness” is replacing religious life, and that might be a good conclusion for anyone who, like the author, admits that “I don’t know many people with organized religious lives” which can also be interpreted as “I don’t know many people who aren’t like me.” By the time we get to her chapter that is simply titled “Cult,” the reader might get the sense that she’s not just talking about crystals and sound baths (meditation in which people are “bathed” in sound waves), but about any person who professes any kind of spiritual belief.

The only wellness practice she seems to respect throughout her journey is simple meditation — closing her eyes and repeating a mantra silently, twice a day, 20 minutes at a time. “… it was great to be so totally, completely still,” she writes. She also practices the 4-7-8 breathing technique to calm herself: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds. “There are technical reasons why it works: stress is all sympathetic nervous system; slow breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nerves, calming it all down. It’s simple, logical, direct. For me, it works.”

Summarizing her conclusions at the end, Larocca worries that we are replacing one set of disordered behaviors and practices with another set of disordered behaviors and practices. We don’t know the long-term effects of household chemicals on our health, but we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vitamins and supplements we are being sold today, she writes. What she knows to be true is mostly the stuff we already know: “Drink enough water. Sleep as much as you can. Eat big leafy greens instead of things you can’t pronounce.” And so on. But she also acknowledges, “What is most relevant to my health is my socioeconomic status.”

“What no one wants to say is this: what you really need is to be lucky, and what is often meant by ‘lucky’ is rich.” In other words, wellness might not be the cult of the middle class as Dan Rather once postulated, but the cult of the upper class. B —Jennifer Graham

“It is a strange fact of human history that we tend to focus so little on disease,” John Green writes in his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. In a history class in college, “I learned of wars and empires and trade routes, but I heard precious little of microbes, even though illness is a defining feature of human life.”

Instead, in school, disease is related to medicine and the biological sciences, even though a certain disease, with which Green is currently obsessed, is part of the reason why New Mexico became a state, and one of the reasons that three teenagers were so willing to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, leading to the start of the first World War War.

This disease, in Green’s telling, also indirectly gave us the cowboy hat.

The origin story of the Stetson is the rare light-hearted anecdote in a book about the oldest infectious disease on the planet. Globally, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people a year, even though it’s rarely seen in the U.S. and we don’t vaccinate for it here. When cases do arise — as one did in New Hampshire earlier this year — officials work quickly to contain it, and the patient is usually cured.

Like most Americans, Green, who found fame with his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars, paid little attention to tuberculosis — until he encountered it while visiting health care facilities in the West African nation of Sierra Leone a few years ago. He writes that he considered TB “a disease of history — something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present tense humans.”

Even the language of TB, which has long been called consumption, sounds quaint to American ears.

But after Green met a 17-year-old in Sierra Leone who had been stricken with the disease in childhood, tuberculosis had a face. He returned home and started to read about TB, and suddenly, everything was coming up tuberculosis. It turns out that Green even had a relative who died of TB in 1930 at age 29.

Green is the history teacher we wish we’d had in high school. We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general, and he strings them together while, in alternating chapters, introducing us to Henry, the young patient at a TB hospital in Sierra Leone called Lakka.

Green assumed that Henry was much younger than he was because he was so small. His size, however, turned out to be because of chronic malnutrition compounded by TB, which destroys the appetite as it eats away at the body, especially the lungs.

Tuberculosis is curable with the right medication. So why, except when it was briefly displaced by Covid-19, is this still the world’s deadliest infectious disease?

For one thing, people are especially vulnerable to TB if they have a weakened immune system because of diabetes, malnutrition or HIV. It spreads in tight quarters when people cough or sneeze. Most people who are infected will not develop the disease; about 10 percent do, and not everyone with “active” TB will die from it as they commonly did centuries ago.

But because the disease has developed resistance to treatment and proliferates in places with the least resources, it is still causing significant suffering to people like Henry and his mother, whose lives were already cruelly hard before tuberculosis moved in. The mother struggled to feed her two children and at times couldn’t afford to buy rice, Henry and his sister subsisting for a time on milk flavored with spices.

As Green explains, in rich countries with robust health care systems, a person with money or insurance can get testing that pinpoints the specifics of a TB infection, allowing for proper treatment.

In poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, where Ebola killed a sizable number of physicians and nurses during the most recent outbreak, these tests were not available, nor was the most cutting-edge of treatments. Henry’s condition was diagnosed with an X-ray and he was given a general cocktail of pills that were ultimately ineffective. He was trapped in a roller coaster of getting better and then getting worse. By the time Green met him, the teen had been sent to a hospital where patients go to die.

The night before he was transferred, Green writes, mother and son lay together in Henry’s hospital bed “and together they cried through the night.”

The facility to which he was being transferred was the one where he would, by sheer chance, meet Green.

Green takes us through the history of TB, including one of the more bizarre chapters of the disease: the period in the 18th and 19th centuries in which the disease became romanticized and even contributed to long-lasting standards of beauty. “Maybe the nineteenth-century Romantics would die early, but oh, the poems they would write,” was the thinking of the time.

John Keats died of TB at age 25, as did Stephen Crane at age 29; the Bronte sisters had tuberculosis. For a time, “Consumption was believed to bring the creative powers to new levels, helping artists get in deeper touch with the spirit as their worldly bodies literally shrank away,” Green writes. This idea was so prevalent that as TB rates fell in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century some people worried aloud that literature would suffer.

But Keats, who would wake up in the night crying from the pain, put to rest any romantic notions about TB, writing at one point, “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

It is this suffering, apparent in Henry’s story, that Green wants us to remember, as he crafts the book around the question: Will Henry survive?

In less capable hands this could seem like a gimmick, but in fact, as Green makes clear, the odds have never been good for people with TB — one author has estimated that it killed one out of seven people who have ever been alive. It’s a legitimate concern since, even when a best-selling author takes an interest in your case, survival from active TB is never guaranteed. Everything is Tuberculous is full of heartbreaking stories of desperate doctors who were unable to save their own children.

In many ways, technology has made the world’s problems our own, and many people suffer from compassion fatigue, as the needs are so great. One of the privileges of being an American in the past few decades is to not have to think about tuberculosis at all. But maybe, Green suggests, that has been a mistake, and we need to start thinking about tuberculosis again. A —Jennifer Graham

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham