Book review: A terrible loss has impelled Mara, the 37-year-old protagonist of Freeman’s starkly beautiful novel, to abandon her current life, shedding her roles of wife, sister and daughter.
” , to abandon her current life. The only way forward she can see for herself is to shed her roles of wife, sister and daughter. Her determined detachment is palpable from the opening sentences: “On the long bus journey out, she doesn’t cry or even have a single thought that she can name. She watches the dark impossibility of the road instead…”
“Tides” is written in the third person and in the present tense, which immerses you in Mara’s days and nights in sometimes unnerving real time. Significantly, she and all other characters are not named until almost halfway through the book; Mara is simply “she,” and other characters — teenage girls working summer jobs, day laborers, a preppy guy in a bar — are known by physical appearance and how they interact with her, in well-chosen, incisive details.
Freeman, a resident of Greater Boston, earned her MFA from Columbia University, where she won the Henfield Prize for the best work of short fiction by a graduate student. Her work has been published in a variety of literary magazines. This is her first novel.a novel, not a novella, most pages of this physically small book show more white space than black ink, in a tightly crafted style that is somewhere between prose and a prose poem.
The regular pattern of work days sustains her. She frequents the local library, where she is drawn to a book of aerial photography, comforted by “how everything is made both legible and strange by distance.” This is her, trying to parse her sorrow and her accountability, trying to sharpen the boundaries where she exists separate from others in her life.
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