I Smile Back

September 15, 2008
This crushing novel by the author of A Mouthful of Air
is a shocking portrait of suburban ennui gone horribly awry. Laney Brooks, approaching middle age in Short Hills, N.J., appears to have it all: doting husband, two beautiful children, the big house with a kidney-shaped pool. But beneath the facade of upper-middle-class perfection, Laney’s life descends into a chasm of indiscriminate sex and drug and alcohol abuse. Koppelman’s prose style is understated and crackling; each sentence is laden with a foreboding sense of menace, whether she’s describing a sunny Florida resort or the back alley of a seedy strip mall. Laney’s self-debasement can be a bit over-the-top at times, but like a crime scene or a flaming car wreck, it becomes impossible not to stare.

November 15, 2008
A beautiful, thirty-something suburban housewife, Laney Brooks is married with two lovely children to a successful insurance broker and author. However, her perfect life is a facade: she drinks too much, pops pills, snorts cocaine, and sleeps with any man who catches her eye. Koppelman's portrait of this self-destructive suburban matron is wrenchingly accurate. In elegant, almost poetic prose, she guides readers through the mind-numbing activities that make up Laney's days and dissects those events that have precipitated her deep, chronic clinical depression. This short novel is not an easy read; so vividly is Laney's misery limned that as the heroine spirals downward, readers intimately share her agonies. The author, whose first novel, "A Mouthful of Air, " detailed a young New Yorker's postpartum depression, is becoming the spot-on chronicler of 21st-century women with mental illness. Her brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain with readers long after they've finished the book. Highly recommended for literary collections.Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2008
Laney, beautiful, married with two children and a seemingly fine suburban life, feels only impending doom shadowing her and everyone elses life. She finishes many sentences in her mind with and then you die, and comes to know that nothing bad needs to happen for her to feel sad. So she misbehaves: drinks too much, uses drugs, and sleeps around. Her husband, ever patient, copes and sends her to rehab, but nothing connects or fills the hole left by her fathers abandonment long ago. She always expects failure and loss. Koppelman has visited this area before with a more sympathetic character in A Mouthful of Air (2003). Koppelmans writing is expressive and nuanced, so the reader recognizes Laneys pain, but doesnt feel it. And perhaps that is the point. Her separation from everyone, even the reader, is her strongest characteristic. Her aloneness gives her the distance she both wants and fears. Therefore this potent novel is captivating in the way watching a car wreck might be. It is not easy or comfortable or for the faint of heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)