A QUIET LIFE

After sudden, life-changing loss—then what?

In his second novel, Joella returns to the narrative gambit of his debut, A Little Hope (2021), establishing parallel narratives for several small-town characters and then—poof!—revealing how they turn up in each other's lives. Here the town is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the time is deep winter, and the characters are Chuck, Kirsten, and Ella. Chuck is a recent widower in his early 70s whose grief after the death of his wife is immobilizing, and regret over one poorly resolved disagreement—he was wrong, so wrong, and now he can never fix it—becomes an obsessive concern. Kirsten is a 20-something whose beloved father was murdered during a gas station robbery; like Chuck, she is derailed by grief, abandoning plans to apply to veterinary school and moving numbly through her days working at an animal shelter. Ella is a young mother whose ex-husband picked their daughter up early from school one day several months ago and completely disappeared. As collateral damage, she also lost her house and is now working two menial jobs to pay rent. Joella develops these characters with enormous empathy and clarity in the sonorous narrative tone of a benevolent god who sees and knows all and who can be counted on to address the chaos he has wrought on their lives. The guiding image of the book is a cardinal: According to Chuck's late wife, Cat, "the most special birds because they kept us company in winter when the other birds leave." "Be someone's cardinal," she urged her middle school students, one of whom, it turns out, was Kirsten. The childlike pleasure of discovering connections like this is one of the most basic joys of reading and is key to Joella's storytelling.

The soothing tone and warm worldview of this grown-up bedtime story will be good for what ails you.