cover image Redeeming Eve

Redeeming Eve

Nicole Suzanne Bokat. Permanent Press (NY), $24 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-57962-064-6

It is the modern woman's challenge to juggle career and family, and Bokat's likable, amusing characters struggle gamely to survive the contemporary conundrum, attempting to fit messy life into neat little packages. For ambitious Eve Sterling, a 30-year-old Manhattanite and Jane Austen scholar who is trying to finish her dissertation, a husband and baby are not on the syllabus. But then she falls for gentle, decidedly unscholarly Hart, a freelance photographer, and he quickly proposes. Before the wedding, Eve and Hart are both surprised and dismayed to discover she is pregnant; selfishly, she worries about the last chapters of her thesis while he struggles to cope with new responsibilities. Hart's caricaturish Jewish parents and Eve's overbearing mother, Maxine, an infertility counselor and TV personality, only exacerbate the couple's troubles. With the arrival of baby Gemma, Eve and Hart relocate to suburban New Jersey, which leaves Eve feeling bereft of her old identity. She tries to hold on to her aspirations, but watches many of them slip away in the depressing and jealousy-inducing episodes of her new life: her adviser's rejection of her thesis, her friend Dee's book contract, Hart's unemployment and her mother's rise to fame on the Mornings with Maxie! show. Eve believes the only way she will find resolution is to take a break from her family and finish her paper. The quest to balance motherhood and Ph.D. research makes for a contemporary and sometimes amusing plot, though the clumsy incorporation of letters written over the course of Eve's self-imposed exile interrupts the narrative flow. Despite this type of first novel flaw, Bokat serves up an ably written tale complete with an Austenesque happy ending. (June)