Instructor

Follet (Tell It Slant) underwhelms with this diffuse meditation on grief, loss, and renewal. In 1988, Toronto woman Ydessa Bloom picks up the pieces of her shattered life after her husband, Roger, a pilot, dies in a plane crash. In her bereavement, she rents a cottage on remote Baptiste Lake, where Roger’s plane went down, and befriends a precocious nine-year-old boy, Henry, whose mother died the year before. The first act of the novel is a thoughtful, curious look into the insularity of grief. However, once Ydessa leaves the lake for New York City, where she has heartbreaking encounters with survivors of the AIDS epidemic, then devotes herself to a guru at a Vermont ashram, the narrative wobbles under the weight of a surfeit of underdeveloped characters and gratuitous amounts of internal dialogue. In 2003, Ydessa meets Henry again as an adult, and while this thread has the potential for intrigue, Follett’s sparse lyrical style grows exhausting, and the occasional switches in perspecive and into second-person narration become distracting. By the end, neither the characters nor the plot feel entirely coherent. It’s a disappointing tangle. (Feb.)