Slyly solemn and skillfully surprising ... Claire is never anything but convincingly drawn ... The story profits from having its point-of-view character in the dark, so to speak, rather than seeing everything through the mind of the existentially petulant Claire. We stay in the mystery of this couple, with its shades and shifts. And in the final pages, with their small, quiet turns, we have the readerly satisfaction of a good ending, that elusive and beckoning goal.
After more than eight years of treatment for metastatic breast cancer, Claire has run out of options. The first scene of Ann Packer’s smart, surprising novel Some Bright Nowhere is her final visit with the oncologist ... When the time comes, Claire gets what she has fought for: a good ending. This lovely book gets the same.
The polar opposite of a beach read, but that doesn’t mean it’s a total drag. Packer has a gift for depicting the undercurrents of emotion in moments when two people who have been together for decades ... It feels like Packer has a deep understanding of the complex emotions she portrays in Some Bright Nowhere. And like we’ve been given privileged access to a horrible situation we’d all like to keep confined to the pages of a book.
A heartbreaking scenario that is almost hard to wrap one’s head around, though Packer makes the reader believe it ... Packer is highly skilled at creating dynamics where moral obligation to others and individual personalities intersect to create drama ... Packer moves us through these challenges to mostly good effect, including small, meaningful moments tangential to the focus on Claire and Eliot. Some notes — like the contrived dinner with the ex-employee — don’t work as well, but overall, this is an involving read.
