From Publishers Weekly
Former TV news producer Wenner (Setting Fires) crafts a sometimes trying but complex and engaging protagonist in fragile, haunted Marea Hoffman. Marea has had horrendous nightmares of nuclear annihilation since her childhood in 1950s Princeton. In 1975, just before her 30th birthday, she returns to New York City after seven years of aimless drifting around the world. Introverted, unattached and endearingly unhinged, she manages to accumulate four therapists and begins an alternately funny, fierce and maudlin process of finding herself ("each one sees a different version of who I am") and understanding her beloved nuclear-physicist father's death 18 years earlier. At nights she works at a Greenwich Village organic bakery owned by a kind, gay ex-stoner; days she sees psychoanalysts and Jungians and ponders: was her father's car crash really an accident? Or did his guilt—for "abandoning" his Austrian Jewish parents, who were later murdered by the Nazis; for helping to build nuclear bombs; for his inability to love his beautiful wife—drive him to suicide? His diary, a "neatly-tied packet of yellowed papers," is an unexpected gift from her estranged mother, and it is this plus Marea's fond memories of her father's colleague "Grandpa Albert" Einstein ("Even though everyone called him a genius, the professor didn't know his times tables. He wished he had invented a refrigerator that didn't hum") that help her to finally put her questions to rest. Despite the occasional awkward piece of dialogue, Marea's tortured path to peace, stillness and purpose rings true.
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The narrator of Wenner's achingly beautiful new novel is named Marea, after the dark seas of the moon, and it is clear that she is not like most people. About to turn 30 and a touch mystical, she has been wandering the world alone for seven years in the clutch of a cosmic depression stemming from her unusual childhood. Her Holocaust survivor father was a nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan Project. Albert Einstein was a family friend. Marea suffered from horrific nightmares about atomic war, and her pacifist mother and Einstein both objected to Marea's father's work on the hydrogen bomb, a conflict that remained painfully unresolved when he died in a car crash. Marea is now in New York, trying to stay anchored and make sense of her life by seeing four radically different therapists, a loaded situation Wenner handles with great wit and purpose. Finally, Marea's mother hands over her father's diary, thus allowing Wenner's haunted, empathic, and intriguing protagonist to come to terms with her personal legacy while Wenner brilliantly parses the terrible ethos of the atomic bomb and celebrates the power of stories, the lifeblood of the talking cure.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
