But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.
“The Half Moon” by Mary Beth Keane is contemporary fiction about a married couple in crisis.
Malcolm and Jess are in their forties. They’ve spent years, and a small fortune, on trying to get pregnant. Malcolm owns a bar, The Half Moon, but thanks to some unsound financial decisions and the struggle to compete with the newer bars and microbreweries, things are not going well in that department, either. Dreams are crumbling, mistakes are made, and these two find themselves facing some really tough decisions. 👰♀️🤵♂️👶🏼🍻📉
He stopped himself from saying it aloud, but they knew each other so well that the air between them became legible, and she could read it anyway.
My minor gripes: 1) I believe Malcolm’s attraction to Jess was explained on three separate occasions (if not more) as because “she was different from other girls”, and 2) the fact that people who assume that everyone thinks New York City is the Best Thing Ever just because they do is a big pet peeve of mine (and the assumption here that no newly single person might actually want to live in the suburbs).
Lastly, I have no idea what half the words in this quote mean: “[he] shaped for per diem work with the sandhogs. He was a little on the old side, but he had a hook…” Shaped for work? Sandhogs? A hook? Huh?
But overall the writing was very good, and the characters felt quite real, as did their experiences. I didn’t necessarily enjoy how the feelings the story engendered were mostly depression and claustrophobia, but there is certainly hope here, as well, and a theme throughout of starting anew and choosing to redirect the story of your life.
The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song.
TW: Infertility, miscarriage, infidelity
Jessica Crawford 