Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. But when she receives a letter from a women's prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the peope she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon, and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life.
Bieker explores the nexus between patriarchal control, environmental contamination and women’s bodies, here found in Clove’s focus on corporeal purity as a rejection of her chaotic past ... A thoroughly modern addition to feminist fiction about mental illness and motherhood ... As the cadence of the book quickens from commonplace to catastrophic, Clove goes off the rails in a spectacular series of bad decisions that make no sense except within the frenetic constraints of her desperation.
Chelsea Bieker breathes thrilling, risky energy into the familiar trope of the madwoman ... Bieker’s women are no fragile Ophelias or Madeline Ushers... they are complex and shrewd, claiming an agency that lends the novel much of its twisty, propulsive plot ... Exposition breaks some of the novel’s spell. But the prose crackles with tiny shocks and arresting images that more than make up for these brief lapses ... Bieker’s writing is raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence ... A well-paced and absorbing page-turner that’s worth the price of a couple of fair-trade coffees and probiotic coconut yogurts.
