Donna Has Left the Building

April 15, 2019
A recovering alcoholic flees her suburban life for a road trip in this witty romp from Gilman (Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress). Donna Koczynski, five years sober and still struggling against her craving for a drink, has been selling kitchenware in Troy, Mich., for more than a decade—a far cry from her dreams of forming a punk band. When Donna arrives home early from a disappointing work conference, Donna discovers her dentist husband with a dominatrix. She immediately packs up the family Subaru, buys a guitar, and makes her way from Michigan to New York on a trip filled with many stalls and mishaps, including an ill-advised trip to a former boyfriend in Nashville. When Donna feels there is no way things could get worse, she gets an emergency phone call that her college-age daughter has fallen ill while traveling in Greece. Donna flies over and, after the two reunite, finds kindness and generosity in a country ravaged by an economic crisis and realizes her problems pale in comparison. Donna is reliably irreverent (“I’m an alcoholic. A founding member of the Margarita Mafia, as a bunch of us on the PTA at my daughter’s middle school once christened ourselves”) and her travels follow a moving evolution to renewed confidence as she comes to terms with mistakes and regrets. Fans of Jonathan Tropper will love this.

April 1, 2019
A suburban mom takes off on a wild road trip that changes her life and her perspective. Donna Koczynski was once in a punk rock band, but she gave all that up when she married stable, reliable Joey and had her two children, now teenagers. Now, she's a saleswoman for a kitchenware company, and she spends most of her days doing cooking demonstrations in malls and homes. She's also a recovering alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in years, and although her life isn't perfect, it's comfortable. That is, until she comes home early from a sales conference to discover that her husband is cheating on her. Distraught and confused, Donna gets in her car and takes off, destination unknown. She finds an old friend she lost touch with, reconnects with a high school sweetheart, and tries her best to avoid taking a sip of alcohol. All the while, she unravels more and more as she runs from her problems and searches desperately for a solution. But when her family needs her, Donna realizes that the answer to her problems may not be where she's looking--in fact, her problems may not be such big problems after all. Donna's inner monologue is crude and bracingly honest, which will be refreshing for some readers but off-putting for others. Her increasingly bad decisions as she careens across America are often hard to read. By the time the story enters its third act, Donna has undergone tremendous personal growth, and Gilman's (The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, 2014, etc.) writing is moving and well-researched. Although the final destination is surprising and worth it, some readers may find it difficult to push through Donna's frustrating exploits to get there. A larger-than-life story about a woman who makes drastic decisions in an attempt to get back on track.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2019
Thanks to Gilman's (The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, 2015) characteristic wit and charm, her latest novel is a hilariously over-the-top, devastating yet relatable tale of one woman's descent into and back from a personal hell. Donna Koczynski is a former rock-and-roller, now a long-married mother of two teens in suburban Detroit, reasonably satisfied with her work as a sales representative for a high-end kitchenware line, and committed to her hard-won recovery from alcoholism. After walking into her kitchen on her forty-fifth birthday to discover her husband and his dominatrix, Donna takes off on an impulsive road trip as she tries to rediscover who she was before she was Mrs. Koczynski. The final part of the novel takes an unexpected turn as Donna finds herself embroiled in a global crisis that forces her to put her own troubles in perspective. Gilman's writing is razor-sharp and propulsive as her protagonist maintains her wry humor about her situation while probing underlying questions about self-identity, friendship, love, and memory with sensitivity and grace.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2019

Memoirist Gilman takes readers on a wild road trip in her second novel (after The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street). Following a tragicomic domestic revelation, suburban mom and recovering alcoholic Donna throws off the mantle of predictability to pursue a midlife crisis for the ages. Donna's bad decisions and worse luck lead her from comical escapades to the harrowing edge of the abyss. As she both craves and rejects the mundane safety of life as she's known it, an unforeseen turn in the road elevates her journey far above the navel-gazing lost weekend it might have been. Gilman channels the best of Jennifer Weiner, especially Best Friends Forever, but the spiritual sibling of this novel is ironically the masterpiece of Weiner's nemesis: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. The symmetry of Donna's setting with that of Middlesex will link them for years to come. VERDICT Literary fiction readers, chick lit fans, suburbanites, mothers, daughters, addicts (recovering and otherwise), immigrants, people with dreams achieved and abandoned--all kinds of readers will love this book. A must-have for public libraries of every size. [See Prepub Alert, 12/17/18; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/19]--Nicole Steeves, Fox River Valley P.L. Dist., IL

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.