Being Esther: A Novel
Widowed and in her mid-eighties, Esther checks in with her friend Lottie each morning to confirm that each has made it through the night. But there is no way that she’s going to surrender to her bossy daughter, Ceely, and move into an assisted living facility, which she disdainfully calls Bingoville. In her first novel, Karmel takes an understated and disarming approach to the closing years in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman, imbuing Esther with a subtle but zingy wit and underappreciated intelligence. Esther reflects on her mother’s frostiness and her mother-in-law’s “acid tongue,” her own passion for books, the grinding disappointments and late-blooming joys of her marriage, and Ceely’s harrowing incommunicado years. Brimming with keen observations yet slow to articulate them due to her body’s strange new hesitations, Esther is appalled by how strangers treat her as an “object of concerned looks and condescension.” Karmel’s novel of womanhood, the love and strife between mothers and daughters, marital dead zones, and the baffling metamorphosis of age is covertly complex, quietly incisive, and stunning in its emotional richness. --Donna Seaman