The View from Alameda Island

Bestseller Carr (The Wanderer) falls short with this novel of a woman who pivots from a mid-40s divorce to a surprising new romance. Lauren Delaney is extricating herself from marriage to a surgeon who has spent 24 years inflicting emotional, verbal, and physical abuse on her. She can afford the services of a good lawyer and a lease on a house of her own in the Bay Area enclave of Alameda Island. She also has the support of her sister and close friends. But, straining credulity, she jumps right into a new relationship with Beau Magellan, an affluent landscape designer she meets at random in a church garden. He too is in his mid-40s and mid-divorce. Their coming together and struggles through entirely predictable obstacles thrown down by their irredeemable exes are written like a case study: heavy on omnisciently narrated backstory, and simplified to the broadest brushstrokes of character and motivation. Lacking any real examination of how a middle-aged woman leaving a miserable marriage might think or feel about singlehood, this story neither engages nor enlightens. Agent: Liza Dawson, Liza Dawson Associates. (May)