The Other Life

November 29, 2010
Meister (Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA) ineffectively tackles the question of what one would do if it were possible to choose the path not taken. When 36-year-old Quinn Braverman, a happily married mother of a six-year-old boy, learns that her unborn daughter has a potentially fatal brain abnormality, she's overcome with the desire to just let her own life wash away. As a child, Quinn discovered she could float from one life to another through portals. In the laundry room of her Long Island home, Quinn has found such a gateway in a crack in the wall and decides to go back to the glitzy life she could have led if she had not left her neurotic ex-boyfriend for her husband. In this other life, she can also seek the comforts of her mother, who, in Quinn's current state of being, killed herself as a result of depression. Quinn repeatedly chooses to go back to her "what if" life, knowing that leaving her son and husband behind could emotionally scar them forever. Quinn's selfishness overshadows any sympathy to be had for her character.

December 1, 2010

Instead of her usual lighthearted comedy, Meister (The Smart One, 2008, etc.) attempts spiritual uplift with this semi-supernatural story about a Long Island woman in crisis who accesses portals to an alternative life.

In the 1973 prologue, pregnant and depressed Nan goes into labor as she is attempting suicide. Thirty-six years later Nan's daughter Quinn is living a comfortable suburban life with husband Lewis, who owns a fleet of taxi cabs, and 6-year-old son Isaac, a sensitive artistic prodigy. Pregnant with their second child, Quinn loves Lewis, but she is keeping two secrets: one, that she married him in part to prove to her mother—bipolar Nan, who committed suicide years earlier in 2002—that she could choose a normal guy; and two, that she is aware of the existence of a parallel world in which she is still with her old boyfriend, shock jock Eugene. Quinn carefully avoids the "portal" she knows waits for her in the basement, a "rupture in her universe." Then amniocentesis reveals that the baby she is carrying has a rupture in her skull that may cause major birth defects or worse. Deciding what to do about her pregnancy, Quinn is drawn through the portal into a world where she lives an exciting, childless life with neurotic but exciting Eugene and where Nan is still alive—Nan evidently opened up the portal during her suicide attempt/birthing. As life in her married present gets more stressful, Quinn travels more frequently through the portal to be with Nan, and therefore Eugene. Not that there is much suspense about what choices she is going to make. She'd never desert little Isaac, and Lewis is a selflessly devoted husband, while Eugene is not only creepy but increasingly less attractive. And although the pregnancy is fraught with problems, the overtly stated pro-choice, anti-abortion message makes the outcome a no-brainer.

Despite the (rickety) fantasy bells and whistles, the end result is a standard-issue domestic tearjerker.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2011
In Meisters inventive novel, Quinn Braverman is happily living in a Long Island suburb with her beloved husband, Lewis, and their son, Isaac. But in Quinns basement is a portal to another life, a life in which Quinn didnt choose stable Lewis over her shock-jock boyfriend, Eugene. Quinn avoids the lure of the portal for years, until she becomes pregnant with her second child and learns that the child might be seriously disabled. Quinn escapes through the portal one day, only to find that her mother, Nan, who committed suicide soon after Quinn married Lewis, is alive and well in this other reality. Though Quinn cant fathom leaving her husband and child permanently, the pressure of her complicated pregnancy and the desire to find out why her mother killed herself drive her to keep returning to her other life, even though the portal keeps shrinking every time Quinn uses it. The innovative premise and Quinns desire to understand her mother will resonate with readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)