Becky's Great book Reviews The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

To call Matt Haig's The Life Impossible magical realism is to reduce it to one thing. This novel is more than just one thing. It is a story of love, grief, redemption, salvation and most of all, life. The inclusion of what on the surface feels like the paranormal is just another lens through which to view our world.

Septuagenarian Grace Winters receives an email from a former student, thanking her for being an inspiring math teacher. Grace's response to the student is the bulk of the novel, telling him about her relatively recent, extraordinary experiences in Ibiza.

Grace has spent her retirement in a state of anhedonia: she doesn't really feel much of anything. Ever since her husband passed away, and years earlier, her young son, Grace has lived in a state of just existing. Self-protection against the guilt she feels surrounding the death of her son and her relationship with her husband after he died is all she knows.

But then Grace receives an unexpected gift. She is willed a house in Ibiza by a long-lost teacher friend, Christina. This is confusing to Grace because she didn't know the woman very long and has not stayed in touch with her. But as Grace puts it, "I had always been the type who couldn't see a question without pursuing an answer. Wherever it took me."

While in Ibiza, Grace begins experiencing what at first seem like illogical things. She is resistant. But when she meets and befriends the people that Christina was close to Grace encounters an undersea aura that causes her to develop certain talents. Grace eventually becomes open to her new gifts of precognition, telepathy and telekinesis. Joining forces with her Ibizan allies, Grace sets out to stop a greedy, evil villain from destroying the ecosystem and natural beauty of an islet off Ibiza by putting in a luxury hotel.

The willing suspension of disbelief is required here. If you've ever had the feeling that there is more to the world than meets the eye, this novel will take hold and not let go. As Grace points out, "being open to possibility is being open to pain, failure, and disappointment, so the temptation is to curl up like an armadillo." Grace ultimately does not curl up like an armadillo and it is inspiring and wonderful to read in The Life Impossible. I give Matt Haig's fantastical novel five stars out of five.