Women and Children First

“How often do you finish a novel, only to find yourself flipping back to the first page and thinking, I really ought to start that all over again? . . . Set in a struggling New England town, the novel unfolds through interlocking stories—something like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad . . . a rich and textured book, with shades not only of those female authors, but also Mary Gaitskill or Lorrie Moore, through its investigation into female agency,