About the Book
It’s the fall of 2016. Cate,
a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago’s theater
community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it’s time to get past
her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a
firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has
tentatively started something new even as she’s haunted by an old,
going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent
marriage, is currently camped out in Cate’s spare bedroom, in thrall to online
conspiracy theories, and she’s not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale,
a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate’s model for what
serious adulthood looks like.
Only a few blocks away, but in a parallel universe we find
Nathan and Irene—casual sociopaths, drug addicts, and small-time criminals.
Their world and Cate’s intersect the day she comes into Neale’s kitchen to find
these strangers assaulting her friend. Forced to take fast, spontaneous action,
Cate does something she’s never even considered. She now also knows the
violence she is capable of, as does everyone else in her life, and overnight,
their world has changed. Anshaw’s flawed, sympathetic, and uncannily familiar
characters grapple with their altered relationships and identities against the
backdrop of the new Trump presidency and a country waking to a different
understanding of itself. Eloquent, moving, and beautifully observed, Right after the Weather is the work
of a master of exquisite prose and a wry and compassionate student of the human
condition writing at the height of her considerable powers.
My Review
I always get bummed when a book is a miss for me, but unfortunately I could not get invested in Right After the Weather. The pacing is quite slow throughout, and the peak of the story that we learn in the synopsis doesn’t occur until over halfway through the book. I actually had to go back and re-read the synopsis because I was confused and wondered if I pulled the wrong novel up on my Kindle. The story reads more as literary fiction which I am not a personal fan of, but perhaps if that is your usual repertoire you might find this one interesting. The characters all seemed a bit disjointed to me, and overall it was timely to get through and didn’t hold my attention.
2 stars
