August 2015

Confession: I know Elisabeth Egan, the author of A WINDOW OPENS, well enough to call her Liz. She is open, honest, fun, funny and wickedly smart. Whenever I meet with her, I crave more time and walk away smiling. She had mentioned through the years that she was writing a novel, and as soon as I saw there were advance copies, I had to read it. If you have not met Liz, you will know what she is like once you read this book. It’s open, honest, fun, funny and wickedly smart just like her!

It’s fiction, set in a town in NJ much like the one where I went to high school and the one where Liz lives. In it, Alice Pearse is a mom of three, and the promo copy says it so well: she is “a compulsively honest, longing-to-have-it-all, sandwich generation heroine for our social-media-obsessed, lean in (or opt out) age. Like her fictional forebears Kate Reddy and Bridget Jones, Alice plays many roles (which she never refers to as 'wearing many hats' and wishes you wouldn’t, either).”

Alice lands what she thinks is her dream job at Scroll, a new company that boasts it offers “the future of reading,” with literary lounges where readers will gather to sit and…read. She quickly realizes that this nirvana-like environment is not going to be fulfilled the way she envisioned it --- and neither is her life. Instead, she is marching lockstep into a world where bean counters are dictating culture-measuring numbers, not the beauty of words. (And um, if this sounds like a bookseller we all know, I will share that Liz spent a year working for a Seattle-based company between magazine gigs and she could call that year research, if you know what I mean!).

Home is a tangle of children and a husband, with everyone coming together and moving apart. And there is sadness as Alice’s dad is ill; clearly, this moment makes her rethink as never before “just what am I doing with my life?” We’ve all had those, and what we do when we have them redefines us.

For booklovers, there is so much here to make you smile as it works as a love letter for bibliophiles as well as an ode to motherhood today. It is brisk and bright while making you think at the same time. Book groups are going to love it. Hand the kids off for the night and pour the wine. I will do the same and toast Liz, my friend, the author. And then I will chide her to get back to writing because I cannot wait to see what she does next.