Small Silent Things

June 3, 2019
Page’s moving debut explores how tragedy forces surprising changes for a woman who feels out of place in her privileged life. When Jocelyn Morrow’s mother dies, a flood of pent-up emotions and memories of her physically and emotionally abusive childhood are released. Slowly, the dark emotions bleed into her daily life, as she feels increasingly detached from her six-year-old daughter, Lucy. Meanwhile, Jocelyn becomes attracted to her tennis instructor, Kate, and she notices feelings of sexual energy she hasn’t experienced in years. Concerned by Jocelyn’s melancholy, her husband asks her to start therapy. As she dredges up painful memories, she questions herself as a mother and frets over Lucy’s future; Lucy, like Jocelyn, is biracial, and Jocelyn fears Lucy will face many of the same challenges she did. Jocelyn also begins speaking with neighbor Simon, an architect and refugee of the Rwandan genocide who is tormented by the loss of his family. When Simon receives a letter from someone claiming to be his daughter, he must decide how to respond. As Jocelyn’s marriage slowly deteriorates, she forms a bond with Simon that helps her regain a sense of hope. Though several threads of the story feel incomplete, the climactic final scene makes for a dramatic finish. The plot is frustratingly circuitous, but Jocelyn’s electric voice and heartrending battle with depression make this a profound and pleasing character study.

August 1, 2019
Page's touching debut novel moves between two characters in a wealthy Southern California town, both haunted by the past and acting out their confusion in increasingly baffling ways. Jocelyn, married to patient Conrad and mother to six-year-old Lucy, goes into a tailspin after the death of her estranged alcoholic mother, Gladys. Despite intensive therapy, Jocelyn is unable to stop feeling her abusive, poverty-stricken past seeping into her privileged present and compensates by throwing herself into a torrid, doomed relationship with her tennis coach, Kate. Meanwhile, her neighbor, Simon, an architect whose wife died and daughter disappeared during the genocide in Rwanda two decades earlier, attempts to relieve his loneliness and forge the semblance of a family by befriending young Lucy. Because Jocelyn and Simon are both emotionally stuck, their actions tend towards the repetitive, to the point where readers may begin to lose patience with them. But Page explores with insight and compassion the enormous impact of past trauma on present behavior, and the dual perspective prevents the novel from feeling claustrophobic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)