NOBODY, SOMEBODY, ANYBODY

A lonely young woman who works as a maid at a yacht club reaches for connection but grasps only straws.

McClorey's debut is a poignant comedy starring an endearing female character whose quirkiness seems to be rooted in some unspecified admixture of disorders that is never fully pinned down in the book. Maybe that's just the point, so readers who identify with the eccentric protagonist don't have to climb over a diagnosis to get there. Though Amy Hanley attended a "rather elite university," as she reminds herself frequently, she is cleaning hotel rooms as she waits to take the test to become an EMT at the end of the summer, hoping to follow in the footsteps of her hero, Florence Nightingale. To short-circuit her terrible anxiety about the exam, she decides to apply a theory she learned in her favorite college class. "It might not be common practice to placebo oneself, but why not try? Weren't we all doing it to some extent every day anyway? Telling ourselves mind over matter, think positively, visualize, manifest, fake it till you make it." In Amy's case, this involves pretending she has already passed the test, making herself a fake results letter and certification card, and celebrating over cake with her landlord, who is also her only friend. What a tangled web we weave....McClorey has the courage to make Amy less than completely likable, which gives the book an interesting edge, but her courage seems to fail in the final pages. The story stops rather than ends, pretending to be more conclusive and less depressing than it is.

Like a tasty half sandwich. What's here is good, but it's not quite enough.