Will I love Same As It Ever Was?

Very well-executed family drama.

Out buying vegetables, Julia encounters a woman she hasn't seen for twenty years. This shakes up her world and keeps the pages turning. Running over her years getting the perfect life, the chance encounter forces her to reconsider everything and foreshadows a crashing downfall.

The writing is clear, no frills, yet gets right into the mind of a very complex protagonist.

I was immersed in Julia's world. She is a flawed mother and wife in a long marriage, with all the ordinary issues of any long marriage. Nothing earth shattering in the plot, but I felt I lived in Julia's house, her neighborhood, I could see her kids, could feel her struggles with depression, with wanting to be a different kind of mother than the one she had. I read this as a library book, then bought it, so I could study Lombardo's careful details, the way she really puts you into the character's heads and hearts and homes. This is… show more.

As I wade through middle age, I found some of the themes of this book deeply relatable. It is wonderfully written and normalizes how human and inadequate we all can feel.