My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Sidney is not someone I want as an enemy. Or, really, as a friend. No relationship at all was my preference.

Apparently, he’d wanted to make her an honest woman (eye roll), but then a few months after I was born decided he didn’t want honesty that bad.

“You know what I love about you?” “Do tell,” said the other, solicitously. “It’s like . . . ummm . . . how do I explain this? It’s like you hold me steady, but without holding me still.”

…our relationship always felt like such a tenuous thing. Aside from storytelling, Cass’s greatest gift seemed to be absence— that she could easily vacate her physical body. She was almost always somewhere else, and I had started to take it as a personal affront.

I’ve never let myself fully relive this memory before. It’s always been front and center but cordoned off behind yellow caution tape. No doubt my brain’s way of protecting me from feeling as I do right now, which is like a bomb of regret has exploded all over me and no amount of scrubbing could ever remove the stain

She wasn’t above such tactics— no one who succeeds in politics is. We’d both gotten our hands dirty over the years, and likely would again, but also, we donated monthly to six different nonprofits and sat on the board of three others— morality is a delicate ecosystem.

My Review:

 

Agnst, twists, heartbreak, clever snark, and profoundly insightful musings and observations permeated every page of this keenly and perceptively penned tome.  There was a heaping helping of angst and far more than I knew what to do with, as profound insecurity and anxiety are not my jam, but were an integral part of the main character’s personal journey.  This was my first experience reading Ms. Fagan’s clever arrangements of words, which alternated between squeezing my heart and putting a smirk on my face.