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Days of Awe
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Days of Awe
Unavailable
Days of Awe
Audiobook8 hours

Days of Awe

Written by Lauren Fox

Narrated by Luci Christian

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Only a year ago Isabel Moore was married, the object of adoration of her ten-year-old daughter, and thought she knew everything about her wild, extravagant, beloved best friend, Josie. But in that one short year: her husband moved out and rented his own apartment; her daughter grew into a moody insomniac; and Josie - impulsive, funny, secretive Josie - was killed behind the wheel in a single-car accident. As Isabel tries to make sense of this shattering loss and unravel the months leading up to Josie's death, she comes to understand the shifts, large and small, that can upend a friendship and an entire life. Heartbreaking and wryly funny, Days of Awe is a masterly exploration of marriage, motherhood, and the often surprising shape of new love.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 18, 2015
ISBN9781681414416
Unavailable
Days of Awe
Author

Lauren Fox

Lauren Fox, who earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota, is the author of the novels Still Life with Husband and Friends Like Us. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Marie Claire, Parenting, Psychology Today, The Rumpus, and Salon. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two daughters.

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Reviews for Days of Awe

Rating: 3.6666665456140355 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

57 ratings11 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Iz and Chris's marriage is disintegrating, her best friend Josie died in a car crash and her daughter is just about to be a moody teenager, so Iz has enough on her plate. This was easy to read with a great style of writing but how I wish I could have felt more for the characters. I wanted to empathise but just couldn't. The author is really talented and I would definitely choose to read her books on another occasion.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Days of Awe was a mixed bag for me. I did not particularly connect or care about Isabel throughout much of the book. While the writing was descriptive and elegant it also felt somewhat distant. There were several plot points that felt forced or unreal especially her relationship with her husband. I could not understand how a couple that was so close and connected could fall apart that easily. I know that death kicks families right through their hearts and guts and changes everything. Isabel was so stricken with guilt, self-loathing, grief and her husband was tired of it and was mourning too. I intellectually understood that but I couldn't feel it and it seemed contrived. I am also so tired about plots of therapists who sleep with their clients. I have not read a book in about 5 years where there is a therapist who is appropriate. It is trite and boring. Days of Awe became more engaging to me as Isabel allowed herself to really recognize that her best friend Josie, the friend who she counts on to understand her, to listen to her, to play with her, had been harboring secrets about herself. As she gains clarity around how Josie's risk taking and increasingly outrageous behavior masked a depression and fueled her death she came to understand more about her own sadness and anxieties and her own inability to see what is right in front of her. At this point, I became more emphatic towards Isabel and her arduous journey and felt moved by her ability to see what was true and real.Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to review this book for an honest opinion.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Most domestic novels center around marital struggles, but this one focuses on the equally important relationship in most women's lives: their best friend. Isabel and Josie are two teachers up against their middle school, suburban world - and their congruent snark is very wittily portrayed by the author. Their husbands are friends too, and everything works well until a series of unpredictable events undoes all their lives.Told in Isabel's voice, every encounter with each character - especially her mother (who came to the US before the Holocaust survivor and refuses to share her memories) and her daughter Hannah, on the verge of becoming an unfamiliar teen, reads as if you are in the room. Isabel's wildly gyrating internal thoughts provoke her outrageous actions - and we are with her all the way as she tries to recover from the loss of Josie. The end of the book, though satisfying, feels like Isabel's - the true loss of the company of an adored BFF.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent book. Friendship, marriage, children, all the relationships we can have in 1 book - no siblings!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Days of Awe by Lauren Fox is a very highly recommended novel about loss and change. What Lauren Fox presents us with is a year in a woman's life; a year of loss when her world and family is changing dramatically.

    Isabel Applebaum Moore and Josie Abrams met as teachers at Rhodes Avenue Middle School and quickly became best friends. Izzy even introduced Josie to her childhood friend, Mark, and he and Josie married. But now Josie has died in a car crash, leaving a hole in Izzy's life. She is understandably full of grief, but on top of this, her world begins falling apart. Izzy's marriage to Chris becomes full of stress and Chris moves out, into his own apartment. Their 11 year old daughter Hannah, who is also mourning Josie, must now deal with her parent's separation. Added to this is the fact that Izzy's mother who lives nearby, has had a stroke and Izzy can see that she is aging.

    Izzy's overwhelming sadness as she grieves the loss of her friend is understandable, but soon it becomes clear that she is grieving for much more than this one unexpected death and her changing family. She is grieving for the past that her mother, a Holocaust survivor, never talks about except in hints. She is grieving for the lost children of all the miscarriages she has had. She is angry at Mark for seemingly moving on way-too-quickly to a new relationship with a woman who is the antithesis of Josie. She is struggling with her previously adoring daughter suddenly turning into a teen with an attitude and insomnia.

    Izzy has been a dutiful daughter, wife, mother, and best friend. These relationships have defined who she is for years. Now Izzy must come to terms with who she really is, as well as some secrets about Josie that she been unable to face.

    In Izzy, Fox has created an amazing finely layered character. She can be darkly funny, acerbic, and quick witted. She feels things deeply, passionately, but not always openly. When she does comment, she has a unique voice and an individual perspective on everything. Her struggles are universal. Her relationships are all in transition. She is seeking atonement, undertaking an introspective look at her life during this year. (The title is a nod to the Jewish Days of Awe.) I totally understood much of what she was experiencing and the depth of emotion that Fox manages to convey is very true to life.

    The writing in Days of Awe is exquisite, literary, and it perfectly depicts an incredible character whose whole life is in transition. This book had me staying up way too late to finish it, the sign of a compelling story combined with great writing. I had one quibble with it: the ending was way too pat for the rest of the book. Many people liked it though, so this feeling is personal - and based on personal experience. I won't say more, but it did knock it down a star for me, until I decided I liked everything else about Days of Awe way too much to go that low.

    Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday for review purposes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Isabel Moore, a young woman in her early forties, trying to pick up the piece after her best friend's death, her husbands leaving and her daughters new not very nice attitude towards her. Very appealing characters, very accessible writing. Isabel tends to think things she should say and doesn't, and tends to say things in circumstances she shouldn't. She is so very real, flawed and vulnerable. Her comments and thoughts, some of which I quoted in my updates, are at times absurdly amusing at other times sadly funny. Many of the lines in this book are brilliant, one wants to keep reading to see what she will say, think or do next. Plus, I really wanted things to work out for her. This is a book about friendships, marriage, mother and daughter relationships and wanting a happy or at least a start at a happy ever ending. A very quick flowing story about events that could happen to anyone and the ways we sabotage ourselves, even with our best intentions.ARC from publisher.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A special thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

    It took a little time to get invested in the book. There were some confusing bits at the beginning when the story switches between past and present.

    Meet Izzie, recently separated and mourning not only the death of her marriage, but the death of her best friend Josie who happens to be married to her childhood friend Mark. Izzie is not always likable, in fact, I found her extremely immature at times, and if you are looking for a character you can root for, she may not be your girl. In fact, I actually identified more with Chris' feeling towards Isabel and her dramatics. “There is a peculiar kind of terror you feel when the person you are closest to — for better or worse — begins to formulate the idea of a life without you.”

    Fox is a really good writer, and there were many wonderful passages to linger over - she has a gift for capturing emotion. That being said, I did find the the book a bit on the long-ish side and felt that her relationship with her mother and the mother's back story was just extra (it was interesting, but for me just added to the bulk of the book). And if you are waiting for a big finish, the book just kind of fizzles out.

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Isabel Moore, the appealingly flustered forty-something protagonist of Lauren Fox’s novel Days of Awe, is grappling with several profound and sudden changes in her life. In the space of a few devastating months, her husband Chris has moved out of the house and into an apartment on his own, her daughter Hannah, on the cusp of adolescence, has inexplicably transformed from a smiling little girl into a sulky brat, and her out-spoken and rebellious best friend Josie has been killed in a single car crash. The action depicts Isabel’s attempts to compensate for and understand a series of painful losses and her struggle to adjust to a revised sense of self within reduced personal circumstances. Temperamentally, Isabel is somewhat passive: an indifferent disciplinarian, a follower-of-rules who is often shocked by Josie’s mutinous attitudes and defiant behaviour. Both are teachers. Their friendship developed and solidified within that context over a dozen or so years, eventually growing warm and trusting. But in the months leading up to Josie’s accident, Isabel noticed a change in her friend’s demeanor and conduct: an emotional withdrawal and a not-so-subtle shift from simply flaunting acceptable behaviours to outright recklessness. After Josie’s death, the fact that Isabel did almost nothing to explore this change and find out what was causing it is a constant source of guilt. Similarly, she is knocked for a loop when Chris moves out, and seems helpless when confronted by Hannah’s snarly eye-rolling. It is Isabel’s lack of preparedness for the obstacles that life flings in her path that makes her so sympathetic and believable: her candid assessment of herself as someone with no road map for the future, someone who never sees it coming, someone who puts on a brave face but is actually making it up as she goes along. We have all felt that way, especially when life blindsides us with some calamity, but we push forward regardless because society demands that we pretend to have it all under control. Isabel the narrator is under no such constraint, and her fumbling and mostly unsuccessful attempts to deal with the ever more complex challenges of day-to-day living—not to mention her own emotions which, as the pressure mounts, become volatile and unpredictable—provide welcome moments of hilarity within the novel’s tragic framework. Fox’s writing is vivid and engaging, and the narrative is punctuated by wry observations on family, love and parenthood and Isabel’s ironic and self-deprecating admissions of incompetence in just about every aspect of her own life. Days of Awe is a witty, wise and entertaining work of fiction by a writer with a deft comic flair, and if the ending is a bit tidy and abrupt, it hardly detracts from the novel’s emotional clout.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Book on CD read by Luci Christian Isabel Moore’s life has been upended in this last year. Her husband moved out, her daughter has become a sullen pre-teen, and her best friend died in a tragic auto accident. Now she has to figure out who she is and what she wants in life. This is the kind of character-driven novel I really enjoy. As Isabel reflects on past events and her relationships with best friend Josie, daughter Hannah, and ex-husband Chris, the reader comes to know her. I felt her confusion, pain, loss, loneliness, but also her joy and hope for the future. This is a woman I would love to be friends with, to laugh with, share inside jokes with, commiserate with about bad work days or a husband’s or child’s idiosyncrasies. This is the first book by Fox that I’ve read; I’ll definitely read another.Luci Christian does a fine job performing the audiobook. She has good pacing and really brought Isabel to life.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Days of Awe by Lauren Fox is the story of Isabel Applebaum Moore. Her best friend, Josie Abrams, just passed away, and Isabel has to go on with her life. Isabel and her husband, Christopher Moore are separated (though they sometimes have quickie sex). Their daughter, Hannah is not getting along with Isabel. She has hit the temperamental tween years (eleven going on twelve). Isabel has to find a way to get over her grief from losing her best friend and the dissolution of her fifteen year marriage. Mark Abrams, Josie’s husband, grew up with Isabel (and were best friends for many years). Isabel actually introduced Mark and Josie. Isabel tries to stay in contact, but it is hard when Mark quickly moves on with his life. When he gets a new girlfriend that Isabel cannot stand, they see even less of each other. Her ex-husband, Chris also moves on with his life (with their therapist) and does not understand why Isabel is having such a hard time. Days of Awe tells the story of Isabel coping with life in the year after her friend’s death. She also reminisces about her life (childhood, college, her marriage, etc.). The book just rambles on and on until the end of the book (I did not ever think I would get to the end). I am sorry, but I really did not like this book. It is told in the first person point-of-view with Isabel spewing verbal vomit. I give Days of Awe 1 out of 5 stars. I did not even like any of the characters in this book (especially Isabel). I do not like giving books low ratings, but Days of Awe deserved it. I received a complimentary copy of Days of Awe from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The review and opinions expressed are my own.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the months following her best friend’s death, Isabel struggles with loss, guilt, and an imploding family life. Weaving memories together with present day events, Isabel slowly comes to grips with questions that anyone who’s lost a loved one asks. Real relationships are messy, so how do we make things right when someone suddenly disappears? How do we make it through to the other side of that loss? How do we move forward without leaving them behind? Fox’s writing conveys an intimate understanding of the complexity of grief and its many cyclical stages. That said, there is a definite lightness to this book, an underlying thread of humor. Though Isabel uses humor as a method of deflecting attention away from her problems, it nevertheless keeps the novel surprisingly upbeat.There were a few main things I really appreciated about this novel. 1) This reads like grief feels. There were a few beautifully crafted sentences that hyperbolized the process, but (unlike so many other novels dealing with loss) it didn’t feel gratuitous. It was very honest. I really loved when Isabel starts to breath again and realizes she can keep living. It was really well done - the sense of betrayal and guilt at not being constantly sad alongside the feeling that you’re seeing the world around you through a new lens. Just perfect.2) I cannot understate how much I appreciate reading a novel where a real, complicated female friendship was the core relationship. Female friendships - especially long lasting ones - are so intense and complicated and multi-faceted and intimate. This type of realistic portrayal of a friendship is one that I always go nuts for in a novel because it’s so rarely done (or rather...it’s so rarely done well). Isabel and Josie’s relationship felt so tragically real.3) Being from Milwaukee, I always feel a brief swell of pride when any piece of pop culture features my fair city. We're your standard mid-sized Midwestern city, always over shadowed by Chicago, so when we get a few minutes in the sun it always warms my cold, cold heart.I would recommend this for anyone who's known personal loss or anyone dealing with a Relationship in Transition (read it...then you'll get it).