Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She's mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara's prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara's possessions. She's fine. But in going through Sara's old journal, Magda discovers her friend's last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda's upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara's urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she's been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women's retreat meant to "unleash one's divine feminine energy" in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.
Thoughtful and affecting ... An engaging read, though Montague does herself no favors with a confusing beginning — the novel opens with a character who disappears for most of the book — and long-winded sentences that require more than one read.
Affecting ... The trip around the southland goes on rather too long, and Magda’s recessive inwardness is largely to blame. It lends the proceedings a sluggish, claustrophobic atmosphere.
Montague is such a gifted, sensitive and big-hearted writer that she can extend her imaginative sympathy even to Magda’s parents, whose strict Protestant religion taught them to revile this essential aspect of their daughter.
