Attachment

March 3, 2008
In a compelling fiction debut, Fonseca takes syndicated health columnist Jean Hubbard, an Oxford-trained lawyer, through a dramatic demonstration of the limits of attachment. Jean is filing her columns from the remote Indian Ocean island of St. Jacques, where her advertising-genius husband, Mark, has moved them. Their time there is disrupted when Jean intercepts a salacious letter from Mark's London office, which leads her in turn to an e-mail signed by a lubricious “Giovana” (Jean immediately notices the odd single n
). The e-mail features explicit attachments, and without reflecting on the consequences, Jean, writing as Mark, begins an e-mail correspondence with Giovana. Ensuing events occur in a beautifully orchestrated dramatic arc, drawing in Mark's unscrupulous business partner; Jean's stricken father in New York; Mark's first love's daughter; Jean's former beau; and the secret that pushes the 23-year marriage further toward the precipice. Fonseca's nonfiction Bury Me Standing
drew a vivid portrait of the international Gypsy community, and she shifts locales and emotional registers with evocative ease here, delving deeply into her ensemble's motivations. She's as unsparing of their flaws as she is frank about their desires.

Starred review from May 1, 2008
The nature of attachmentor, more accurately, detachment from self, spouse, career, and familyforms the skeleton of this meditative first novel from Fonseca ("Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey"). Meandering and thoughtful, the book is divided into three sections and moves among a lush tropical island, London, and a bustling Manhattan gripped by post-9/11 edginess. The tale revolves around Jean and Mark Hubbard, a long-married couple on sabbatical in picturesque St. Jacques. When Jean inadvertently intercepts an email meant for her husband, the contents send her reeling. Is he having an affair? How long has it been going on? And why? As Jean begins sleuthing, she undertakes numerous deceptions that force her to access how she feels about commitment, monogamy, and revenge. Along the way, issues of female aging come to the fore, even as the need to care for elderly parents smacks head-on into letting go of a college-aged child bursting for independence. Intense and realistic, full of sexual imagery and churning emotion, this work is highly recommended for all fiction collections.Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2008
American Jean Hubbard, a popularhealth columnist in her midforties, and her British husband, head of a London ad agency, have retreated to a remote Pacific island. All should be larky, but instead Jean is confronted by a worrisome mammogram and a cheeky love letter to her husband. In the grip of dread, fury, and perverse voyeurism, Jean assumes herspouses cyber identityandconducts a laughably pornographic e-mail correspondence with her younger rival. Then their daughter falls in love, and Jeansfather is hospitalized in New York. From the paradoxes of island life to an unexpectedly sinister sexual escapade in London to New York in the grip of the 2003 blackout, caustic and preemptive Jean gets nearly everything wrong, yet she persists, learning as she stumbles. In her first novel, Fonseca, author of Bury Me Standing (1995), leads readers into the airless precincts of a midlife crisis, then, thankfully, throws the door open to much more weighty predicaments. Given her agitated narratorspragmatic, skeptical, sometimes ludicrous, point of view, Fonsecas frank takeson sexuality, sexism, age, and how fear undermines love are canny and tonic.An acerbic, funny, and maddeningcoming-of-wisdom novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)