In the first session, Dean sits in torment as he prepares for Lise to reveal the unspeakable with the group: During her first marriage, her baby died at 5 months. So as the hours pass and he hasn’t come home from work, Laura is already bracing for the worst: “She imagined a fire truck pulled over at the side of the road, firefighters walking up and down in their black coats, draping blankets over the dead.” Is she being realistic or simply falling apart? Packer expertly interweaves the backstory of Matt (“this man who looked like a marine and understood feelings”) through passages of unbearable waiting, making the reader feel Laura’s anguish all the more.ĭivorce and the chance to start over come into play, as well, in the searing “Her Firstborn.” Dean and Lise are enrolled in a birthing class whose instructor encourages intimate confessions. “Dwell Time,” serves up tension with the very first sentence: “He was late, which wasn’t like him.” Laura’s new husband - her second - is everything her first husband wasn’t: considerate, dependable. Packer is particularly adept at building suspense - a trait not typically associated with literary fiction - and she teases it out of everyday situations. And for much of the book, Packer, who wrote the best-selling novel “ The Dive from Clausen’s Pier,” demonstrates her unflinching vision. Which means that, as short-story collections go, this one is rich territory. As the title suggests, in her fourth book Ann Packer is focused on the realities of separation, a yearning for connection and what it takes to survive.
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