Wise about humans' ambivalent feelings and often wryly funny ... Alice's relentless, un-comma-ed overthinking of everything is both relatable and entertaining, as is Shetterly's ability to zero in on how many of us were feeling in the summer of 2020 ... You could be annoyed by the family's wealth, with two luxurious homes and an endless stream of Amazon purchases. I was, initially. But I became involved in their lives and in hoping they'd use their time in Maine to find a way back to each other.
Tender ... Shetterly is attuned to quicksilver changes in the family dynamic ... Shetterly is particularly good at showing how caring for children can test a relationship ... Shetterly does not allow Pete the airtime she grants Alice. We get three third-person chapters from Pete’s point of view and nine first-person chapters narrated by his wife ... In certain moments, Shetterly’s debut achieves a subtle grace, a quality of light and shadow worthy of a Bergman film.
I loved reading this book, which I gulped down in two otherwise busy days. I resisted and also relished its bizarro details of the day the world ground to a halt ... Some obvious pandemic markers are strangely absent from the narrative. We don’t see a single episode of a cold or a cough ... While Alice is as “woke” as a hedge fund manager’s frustrated wife can realistically be... she seems to experience little or no empathy for the 99% who suffer so much more than she does ... While I appreciate the author’s rendering of the psychological trauma inflicted by the pandemic even on the wealthy, Pete and Alice in Maine left me longing to read the pandemic stories of the rest of the population.
Perceptive ... Though Shetterly leaves the class and economic elements underexplored... she goes a lot farther in her character development ... As a pandemic novel, this doesn’t add much, but the psychological acuity applied to the family drama is undeniable.
Readers may struggle to connect with Alice, who lacks agency and seems more invested in the ennui of her upper-class existence than in the world around her or her supposed creative goals. Clichés abound, from buttoned-up WASPs to characters spontaneously throwing up when emotional. An uneven portrait of a marriage that relives the early days of the Covid pandemic without offering fresh insight.
