Beautiful, classic Tyler. Her sentences contain multitudes. We meet Willa Dance at eleven years old, coping with her temperatmental mother’s absence and the silence and secrets and frequent bewilderments of childhood, all the while adoring her gentle, calm father. Then the narrative skips to ten years later, when Willa becomes engaged to Derek, a startingly insenitive young man whom her parents see straight through. Then we skip forward twenty years, then another twenty and the bulk of the novel takes place when Willa is sixty one, married, again, to a bit of a prick. A phone call demanding her assistance with her son’s ex-partner’s daughter (I know) jolts her out of a state of stagnation and into a life full of neighbours and runaway cats and bad television that is nothing like her own. She thrives. The ending left me so, so happy. This is fiction stripped back to its essentials and all the more beautiful for it.
