BREAKING AND ENTERING

In the throes of a sanity-destroying summer, a Toronto woman explores a dangerous new hobby.

It’s not just hot, it’s an “end-of-days climate that increasingly resembled an Old Testament Hell.” In fact, thinks Beatrice Billings, “It could rain frogs now and humanity would take it in stride….Oh, it’s always rained frogs....She knew our Saviour had thrown in the towel and gone back to His golf game, and knew that mankind deserved to be punished. Certainly Bea deserved it.” Why does Bea, a 49-year-old Toronto art dealer with a son in college and a shaky marriage, think she deserves punishment? It begins on just another day she’s stuck in her empty gallery feeling lonely, bored, stressed out, and claustrophobic. She Googles “escape.” One video later, she’s sending away for a lock-picking kit. Not long after, she joins a lock-picking club; turns out, she’s very good at it. Next thing she knows, she's trailing a woman who’s just paid cash for a $1,500 dress. She returns to the woman’s home the next day, gets in fairly easily, and leaves with a rich store of knowledge about the lives of this woman and her husband—and also the dress. It doesn’t stop there for Bea, though after the first time, stealing isn’t part of the routine. She does tend to leave marks of her uninvited visits, at one house typing a Descartes joke into a crappy philosophy manuscript and, at another, phoning in a tip to a suicide hotline. Gillmor does an impressive job of keeping Bea not just sympathetic but even normal-seeming as this outlandish summer progresses. She does all she can for her mother, who’s in memory care; she’s patient with her annoying sister, who has lots of opinions while not contributing at all; she misses her son, whose presence in her life has been reduced to infrequent texts, not to mention her husband, who’s drifted as far from her as she has from him. As for breaking and entering? The genius of this book is to capture the exact way a familiar world of aging parents and divorcing friends and nice charcuterie platters could go right around the bend. Oh, you know, it’s always rained frogs.

A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)