A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

August 1, 2018
Thompson (She Poured out Her Heart, 2016, etc.) constructs her latest novel around the parallel themes and variations in the unhappy lives of three generations of women in an unnamed Midwestern college town.Pillar-of-the-community Evelyn, her frazzled, overstretched daughter, Laura, and Laura's independent-minded daughter, Grace, appear to have little in common, but when scrutinized in separate sections, their lives follow an alarmingly similar pattern of deferring dreams for disappointing men. As a young woman, Evelyn has serious academic ambitions and is working toward a Ph.D. when World War II ends. Then she falls into a love affair with Rusty, a veteran who's attending college on the GI Bill but has no interest in academia. He's left town to return to farming before Evelyn realizes she's pregnant. In desperation she quickly manipulates straight-laced and clueless Andrew, a smitten law professor, into marrying her. Ironically, she miscarries. She considers leaving Andrew but doesn't, for reasons left unexplained. Instead, she commits to her marriage and eventual children but never quite overcomes her unrealized academic aspirations. Laura, who considers Evelyn "detached," lacks her mother's career ambitions and is perhaps too attached. She loves her computer-whiz husband, Gabe, but early in their marriage, his off-putting behavior alienates her friends. In her loneliness, she carries on a short, passionate affair with her brother's former high school friend Bob, a car mechanic. Grace is the result. As Laura trudges on in her marriage, she carries the weight of care for the dying Evelyn, increasingly alcoholic Gabe, and Grace's younger brother, Michael, a talented musician with addiction issues. By the time family crises turn tragic, Grace has not yet defined her career or romantic ambitions. She falls into an affair with an inappropriate man who, unlike Bob or Rusty, is genuinely creepy; fortunately, 25-year-old Grace avoids pregnancy. She also stumbles upon family secrets and begins to imagine a future with possibilities.Thompson, who wrote movingly about another Midwestern family in The Year We left Home (2011), here creates a plot and characters that feel more diagrammed than lived.

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August 20, 2018
Thompson’s incisive, intricate novel centers on three generations of women living in a small, unnamed Midwestern college town. Evelyn Wise worked as a history professor during WWII, and after the war married Andrew. Evelyn’s greatest happiness in life seemed to stem from her career achievements—which included work for the League of Women Voters—rather than marrying and raising her two children, Laura and Mark. Laura held career ambitions that paled next to her desire to marry and have a family. Her post-college partying lifestyle led to her meeting Gabe Arnold, a graduate student studying computer science who seemed to be more of an adult than any of the boys she knew. They have two children, Grace and Michael. Grace has now finished college and works at a health food store in town, while Michael struggles with substance abuse and his halting music career. Laura takes on the role of caregiver for Evelyn, who is dying from cancer, and Gabe, who is an alcoholic. Grace struggles to not repeat her mother’s mistakes, determined to live life on her own terms. As Thompson (Who Do You Love) examines the present and past of each of the three generations of women, she adroitly reveals how their life experiences shaped them into being so different from one another. Intense, compassionate, and satisfying, Thompson’s novel is filled with real, complex characters whose destinies are inextricably tied to the women in their lives. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

October 15, 2018

Three generations of women dominate this novel set in a Midwestern university town. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, matriarch Evelyn; her daughter, Laura; and her granddaughter, Grace each strain against family ties that sidetrack their own imagined lives in lifelong, sometimes tragic ways. Evelyn's unplanned pregnancy during World War II hastens a marriage and sidelines her academic career in exchange for reluctant motherhood. Laura's own marital indiscretion and unsatisfying marriage are familiar tales that Laura handles with quiet grit, as she endlessly mediates between her children and their alcoholic father. Grace, tiring of her string of unworthy boyfriends, does her best to advocate for her brother Michael, a gifted rock musician with a serious drug addiction and an escalating antagonism toward his father. Throughout, the exquisitely drawn, enormously sympathetic characters are just trying to get it right. VERDICT National Book Award finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) spares no detail as she captures the angst borne of thwarted dreams and dashed hopes and the relentless depression that can plague families disappointed in not only one another but in themselves and yet stubbornly, seemingly illogically persist in love.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

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