Starred review from February 17, 2020
A tragic accident leads to soul-searching in Masad’s smart, heartfelt debut. Maggie Krause is enjoying an intimate moment with her girlfriend when her younger brother, Ariel, calls to say that their mother, Iris, has died in a car accident. Scrambling to get home to her brother and her dad, Maggie reflects on her complicated relationship with her mother, who was never comfortable with Maggie’s sexuality. After Maggie flies home to California, she finds college-age Ariel struggling to deal with their father, Peter, who is almost catatonic with grief. Because no one else will do it, Maggie makes arrangements for Iris’s funeral and shivah. Then Maggie finds Iris’s will, and with it, a small stack of letters Iris wanted to be mailed in the event of her death. But Maggie doesn’t recognize any of the men the letters are addressed to—and is upset and insulted that her mom would have written letters to strange men but not to her children. Maggie decides to deliver the letters by hand, and as she meets the recipients, she learns that Iris’s life was nothing like what Maggie thought it was. This remarkable portrait of a daughter’s opaque relationship with her mother reflects the strangeness and beauty of coming to see one’s parent fully as a human being.
March 15, 2020
A debut novelist explores the complexities of love and grief. Maggie Krause is in bed with her girlfriend when she gets the call: Her mother has just died in a car accident. When she returns to her childhood home, she finds her younger brother angry and her father paralyzed by grief. The discovery of a cache of letters that her mother, Iris, wanted delivered to five different men gives Maggie something to do besides coping with her family's loss or processing her own feelings: She decides that she will find the strangers to whom these letters are addressed. This road trip is a journey of discovery for Maggie. She learns that her parents' seemingly idyllic union was not quite what she thought it was; the affairs to which the book's title refers are extramarital. As she gets to know the men her mother loved, Maggie also gets to know her mother better. And, of course, she begins to better understand herself. This setup is interesting, but the storytelling veers from the slow and slightly superficial to the...kind of kitschy. A scene with an all-seeing psychic is particularly hard to take seriously, and the whole narrative hinges on a big reveal that feels melodramatic and a bit cheap. Masad has chosen to surprise readers instead of providing them with information they need to understand Iris even though there are chapters narrated from her perspective. Getting glimpses of her trysts feels more voyeuristic than revealing. And the one letter we get to read seems macabre and manipulative--gaslighting from beyond the grave. Where the book succeeds is in depicting queer characters as multifaceted human beings who are not defined solely by their sexuality or gender. Maggie's relationship problems aren't because she's a lesbian; they're because she's afraid of commitment. And it's not often that fiction writers--or anyone, for that matter--depict women of middle age and beyond as beings who desire and wish to be desired. An intriguing but uneven debut.
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April 15, 2020
After her mom, Iris, dies suddenly, Maggie fulfills a request from Iris' will to send five sealed letters, all addressed to men Maggie's never heard of. Exhausted after the funeral, she makes the snap decision to escape her younger brother and her dad, who's nearly comatose in his grief, and deliver the letters in person. Unfolding in California and Las Vegas over the week of Iris' shiva, Masad's debut is Maggie's journey to meet these men, each one more surprising than the last and each telling her so much she never knew about her mom. Occasional chapters from Iris' perspective fill in the story, explaining her loves, her distancing, and her true feelings about Maggie being gay, which always felt to Maggie like disapproval. As the miles add up, Maggie loses herself in thought, nursing hurt feelings over Iris' betrayal, and wondering about things with Lucia, her most serious love to date. A sort of mother-daughter road-trip novel, this explores the idea that we're all incomplete and forever subject to change, especially to those we love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)