Same As It Ever Was

I picked this up because the cover had a quote comparing it to Anne Tyler, and I liked the picture on the cover which somehow reminded me of the view from the window of my house up a hill in Holmfirth. The second is particularly weird because the book turned out to be set in Chicago. I looked the artist up, and the cover painting looks to be a variation on this one: Mostly Maine by Rachel Campbell. The book cover version looks to have been recoloured to make the white houses darker, presumably so the white text of the title stands out, and the darker houses do make it look a bit more Yorkshire than Maine, though neither of those is Chicago. Who knows, anyway I found an artist as well as an author so that’s cool.

Back to the book. We meet Julia at the supermarket, shopping for her husband’s sixtieth birthday dinner party, when she bumps into an old friend Helen, and the atmosphere is a little strange between them. The rest of the book is told switching between this present day and about twenty years in the past when Helen and Julia were friends and you gradually get to the bottom of how the friendship worked and how it dissolved. Incidentally I kept having to reset my brain with the whole twenty year span thing. Apparently it makes no difference that my own kid has gone from baby to twenty-something in much the same time as Julia’s kids have, I still think twenty years ago can’t possibly be later than the 1980s, and definitely can’t be in the twenty-first century. Time is increasingly weird!

For the first half of the book I could have left it and not much cared. Sure, there are mysteries to unravel but they aren’t ones where the reveal is worth much. It was in the second half of the book that things really came to life for me when you start to see how other relationships in Julia’s life - husband and son, mother, daughter and prospective daughter-in-law, are affected by different events as well. It’s a web that takes a while to weave.

I don’t think the comparison to Anne Tyler is entirely misplaced; I do think Tyler gets to the heart of things faster than Lombardo did and this is certainly a longer book than most of Tyler’s. In the end I was glad I stuck with it and I’d certainly read the author again. It’s always easier to read a second book when you can trust the author to deliver.