The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane

With an excellent plotline interspersed with stirring metaphors and believable characters, this novel had me at hello. Having loved Keane's previous novel Ask Again, Yes, my expectations were pretty high and I was not let down.

Jess and Malcolm are a married couple struggling with a lot. Their fertility problems have knocked them out financially and emotionally. The bar Malcolm owns is not doing well and he has gotten them into a shady and dangerous deal that Jess had not agreed to.

When Jess moves out and Malcolm finds out she's taken up with another man that's an acquaintance of theirs he is hurt and thrown for a loop. Alternating points of view throughout the narrative give us Jess's side: she is grieving deeply for the babies they've lost and is not ready yet to give up the idea of being a parent when Malcolm is.

Taking place in a small town in New York, Jess and Malcolm's stresses feel compounded by everyone knowing their business. Keane deftly writes about the pain Malcolm is going though knowing Jess is with another man and having all the town folk know it too. And Jess's anguish over not being able to fulfill her dreams of motherhood is palpable. As Keane writes, they are each experiencing a slow-motion failure of a dream: his the bar and hers delivering a baby.

The author uses beautiful metaphors: after Jess leaves him, Malcolm keeps having a jarring feeling like he's stepped off the bottom of a staircase but the bottom step is missing. And Jess's inability to carry a baby gives her a bereft feeling like she's wandered into a cold pocket of air. A five-day long winter power outage serves as yet another analogy for Malcolm and Jess's marriage and calls to mind the pandemic during which this book was written.

The couple navigates through their obstacles and hurts, accumulating scars along the way. They climactically find a resolution to the shady deal referenced above, which acts as an exciting parallel storyline. As an elderly character wisely says to Malcolm, "Life is really simple when you boil it down". Simply put, but true and the couple seems to come to that realization as well. I devoured this ultimately uplifting novel and recommend it highly.