Our unnamed first-person narrator is a fairly well-known
45-year-old multimedia artist who refers to her child with gender-neutral
pronouns. She’s a creative, progressive
thinker and becomes even more so as the plot develops. Her tale begins with a planned three-week
trip in which she will drive from Los Angeles to New York and back. However, she stops at a motel in Monrovia
and remains there until her scheduled return home, all the while giving her
husband false and sparse details about experiences on a route that she has not
actually traveled. She meets a handsome
thirty-year-old man named Davey and employs his wife to remodel her motel
room. Ok, this scenario is ludicrous,
but the narrator has money to burn, so why not?
She is also helping this young couple fund their nest egg, even as she
becomes friendly with Davey, who offers to show her around town. When he takes his shirt off during a hike,
her sexual attraction to him goes full throttle, and things go from heated to
steamy in a hurry. The visceral, lusty
first half of this novel held my rapt attention, but the plot cools down
significantly in the second half and becomes more about the narrator having to
grapple with two issues. One is the
anticipated loss of her libido during perimenopause, and the other, naturally,
is the precarious state of her marriage.
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