Have you ever been with someone and you knew it was over? Maybe even worse than that, you both knew it was over? In our current society I am almost certain that this happens all the time. Couples that would otherwise leave each other or divorce are forced to stay together for a multitude of reasons, the least of which being financial, but others probably include comfort or familiarity.

In A Separation, Katie Kitamura uses  wealth to help remove these chains to help us work through the story. These are two people who can afford to leave each other, and based on Christopher’s affairs, they probably should. Our wife never gives us a name (or if we discover it it’s so quick that we miss it) and speaks in first person as she narrates us through her search.

She and her husband live in London, but they have agreed to separate and not let anyone know just yet. When his mother Isabella calls to ask where he is, our narrator is sent on a journey to a small luxury hotel in Greece where he was last known to be, according to his mother. It’s a fire-razed area due to arson committed by local feuding farming families, and if you aren’t careful or even looking for it, you’ll miss all the symbolism up front prior to the discovery of Christopher’s body about halfway through the book. This is not a spoiler, you already know that’s what’s coming.

The first half of this book takes you through her decision and resolve to finally end things, to let go and start anew. The second half shows us what we do when we are forced to let go, the steps necessary for moving on. The entirety is told in a narrative voice that reflects the profession of a translator, which the narrator is in the story, and conveys events as they happened in a prose that is almost completely emotionless. Not to sound like a pretentious asshole, but I kind of liked this because it presented a blank slate onto which I could project my imagined emotions based on the character on display at the time and based on my own experience of being cheated on.

So that’s what you can expect from the book itself, but what do I think personally? The first half of the book was very exciting. Despite the deadpan prose I KNEW the husband was dead and I couldn’t wait to find out how. Seeing her make her way around the rural town in Greece revealed a soap opera-esque setup where his only destiny could have been murder. After we discover his murder, the book becomes very mundane and not until the very end do you get the whole picture of this book’s intention, which I believe to be that even a separation comes with commitments. You can move on from something, but if you don’t do it well you will always be chained to it. It is essential to be decisive, to stand up for yourself and what you want, or you could be a slave to something for the rest of your life.

Full disclosure though, if I got 3,000,000 pounds because my estranged husband died and no one knew we had “separated” I would take the money and use it. I know where my limits are and if the man didn’t want to be legally beholden to me he should have taken the ring off it. JUST SAYIN’.

Read it or not, it’s a meh in my book.

I have not watched Stranger Things. The husband watched it and I caught glimpses of it as I moved from room to room doing other stuff. It seemed very normal ’80s type stuff with creepy undertones. What made it seem creepy was that things were juuuuuuuust not quite right.  It’s like how you look at a picture on the wall and you know, you KNOW it’s crooked but it’s SO CLOSE that you try to ignore it because you don’t want to get up, you’re comfy dammit.

This book is like that. I really enjoyed being taken back to the days of ’90s video rental places (RIP Blockbuster). Someone has been recording snippets of very dark home movies on certain tapes and returning them, and other customers are starting to find them and complain. Honestly I’m surprised the characters don’t start sculpting things with mashed potatoes. Our main character is Jeremy, who lost his mom to a terrible car accident when he was a teenager. He lives with his dad and works at the video store. The store owner Sarah Jane gets wrapped up in our endeavor too, and Jeremy’s crush Stephanie joins his team when something doesn’t seem right and requires investigation.

Parallel to the present day story is the story of the Sample family, Dad, Mom, and daughter Lisa, who is our present day creepy lady in an old farmhouse with a dark secret and a very photogenic barn.  Set in the ’70s Mom Sample runs off with a strange, gross, strip mall church congregation and the effects on Lisa may have been…not positive?

Of course we also have a family that discovers the rusting remains of all these events after they decide to buy the very same farmhouse to retire in. They decide to investigate and find that all of our past characters still live nearby.

Over all of it we get the occasional 4th wall thrown in our face because there is a narrator that we forget about until they burst back in, pulling us up into the sky above the action, implying that other timelines went a different way but this one we are observing is the most important or interesting or devastating one.

I expected this to be a kind of alien story. It wasn’t.

I thought it might turn into “The Ring.” It didn’t.

Maybe a horror story where there are crazy murders in remote farmhouse basements? Nope.

Some reviews say it’s a story that drags out the missing mother trope. Well, okay but you have to dig kind of deeply for that. It reads like a thriller, but there are no sociopaths or serial killers to be found. I finished the book today and if I have any feelings about it they center around the idea that it is very difficult to completely escape a small town, and that even when you do part of it stays with you wherever you go, like a key in a junk drawer that no longer has a matching lock.

This is an enjoyable read until you realize that it’s not going anywhere you expect it to, indeed it seems to go nowhere at all. Perhaps something about my experience kept the emotional connection out of my reach. I would encourage you to seek out other reviews on the web about this book. They are mixed, and for good reason. This book is mixed up and perhaps never truly decided what it wanted to be before publication. It’s a shame too, because there are many satisfying ways it could have gone – and it’s the hope that one of those paths would come to fruition that kept me reading.