Review: Best book of the year a novella?  YES.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 24, 2013
I've never read anything quite like this novella; yes, it's a romance, but it's much more than that, as Knox explores with honesty, humor, and grace the numbing demands of caring for others.  Is it possible for a novella to be the best book I've read this year?  Absolutely.Mandy Sharp has just accepted a position as professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay when her sister and sister's husband are killed in a car accident.  Mandy had previously agreed to serve as the legal guardian for her sister's children, and so she becomes the instant mother of Josh, her nine-day-old nephew ("I want him to have everything, but all he has is me").  Over a year later, drained by juggling her career and the responsibilities of motherhood, Mandy has found a way to cope:  she escapes one a night a month to meet a stranger on a train, each assuming a different identity every time they meet.Nine months, nine dates.  She knows nothing about him - and yet she knows everything.  Hidden between the lines of their entirely made-up role-playing fantasies and stories, they tell each other the deepest truths of their selves - as we all do, shaping the face we present to others in altered versions of who we are, pretending to be the people we wish we were and calling this politeness.  As Mandy explains to herself, "Our role-playing has brought all these other versions of me to the surface.  Some of them come so easily and feel so real, I wonder if they're authentic echoes of the person I ought to be."  Or as Madeleine L'Engle has written, "Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."This is too special a book to spoil with further plot summary - but it's also important to note the truly exceptional writing, the small verbal gestures that underscore the theme of the novel, such as the photographs of train wrecks that line the hallway to the male protagonist's office.  Ruthie Knox knows her way around a sentence and has an unerring sense of pace and timing.  She's a writer to watch, and this is a keeper, a book to re-read and to savor.