THE TREE DOCTOR by Marie Mutsuki Mockett 

The unnamed narrator of the novel returns to her childhood home in northern California from Hong Kong when the pandemic hits and curtails her plans to return to her husband and two daughters. Does she want to get back to them? She busies herself restoring her mother’s garden to its former glory with the help of the Tree Doctor. He provides more than gardening advice and labor. There’s sexual awakening, seasonal horticultural changes of rebirth and death, loss (her mother is in a memory loss facility), secrets, and the passing of time.

Favorite line(s): It sometimes felt as though there were a story that existed outside herself—an overstory. She, along with everyone else, measured herself against this story all the time, knowing where she had or had not taken the correct steps and thus whether she was properly placed on the path to adulthood. By the time she was an adult, she knew it was impossible to mold herself to the story, but no one seemed to have any idea what to replace it with. The story spun on and on out there, like the planet Saturn whirling in the sky and bearing down on her life, one of those invisible forces the astrologers said dictate the very experience of existence. There were only a few pockets where one could acceptably deviate from the story’s demands. Tragedy was one example. Sometime people were marked by tragedy before they were supposed to encounter tragedy. Occasionally they go lucky and struck it rich. People liked to say that money didn’t matter, but of course it did. It meant that rules did not, in fact, apply. Tragedy, like great wealth, meant that a person could opt out of the overstory, at least for a while.

LEAVING by Roxana Robinson

What would you give up to keep your family intact? This is the premise of Robinson’s exquisite operatic novel. Nearing the third act of life, Warren rekindles a love affair with Sarah, the woman he wanted to marry years ago, until she severed the relationship out of fears that seem ridiculous now that she is middle-aged and has been through a decades-long lousy marriage. Warren tries to leave his wife, but his daughter, Kat, threatens to cut him out of her life altogether if he goes through with the divorce. Warren makes a tragic decision that alters the remaining years of his life. I loved this quiet novel with its large and messy themes. Robinson is a gift—like her writing and this story.  

Favorite line(s): Warren thinks of metamorphosis, how we think of it as a single seismic spasm, Gregor Samsa becoming a cockroach, but actually everything is always I a state of metamorphosis: plant into dirt, cloud into rain, sea into mist. He doesn’t want to think of his own, how his life has changed. He wasn’t to drain the emotion from the picture of his own world, because if he lets himself feel, he might not survive the pain. It is like a needle in his heart.

GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE by Sloane Crosley

One day, the author returns to her NYC apartment and finds all her jewelry stolen. Her sense of security is shaken. She gets online, tries to find the jewelry on various sites, and hopefully finds the person who stole it. One month later, her best friend Russell commits suicide. The two tragedies loop through her days as the author tries to “right the unthinkable.” And then the pandemic brings the city to its knees. Crosley lives in the before and after lives—the past with her best friend and possessions intact and the fallout from both tragedies. How do you move forward in a world with the unimaginable?

Favorite line(s): I’d spent no small amount of time, in the months after Russell died, daydreaming about how luxurious it would be to prepare for loss. Turns out the prepared version is not so hot. Perhaps this is the plainest definition of anxiety: mourning what isn’t gone yet. Anxiety is an ever-present stage of grief, a shadow attached to the heels of its more infamous siblings. If you look closely, you’ll see it in the background of all the family photographs. But how else is one meant to handle an invisible threat?