I'll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year, 1995, anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child. With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them, a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he's unwilling to share and the man who is now disastrously attempting to woo her, a couple in denial about a looming health crisis, and their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can't stop lying.
Kauffman gives us vignettes rather than the wide view. Each scene has its own arc ... The joy in this book is something to admire deeply ... The delights aren’t cheap, either: Kauffman loves them enough to bestow upon them the genuine, radiant, quiet, don’t blink kind of happiness. She shows us there is room in a novel — as in the heart — for everyone.
Portrayed with deep compassion ... Many nuanced, expressive voices ... The ending felt a bit rushed to me when one character’s large-looming opinion about his parents’ divorce seemed to flip behind the scenes. But that’s probably due in part to the fact that I wasn’t ready to let go of people that felt so real.
