Laws of Love and Logic

Curtis’s affecting debut finds a married woman trying to hold onto the love of two men. It begins with Lily Webb’s painful adolescence in 1970s Rhode Island, when she loses her mother to breast cancer at 13. In high school, she dates a promising football player known only as “the boy.” During the summer before college, the boy finds Lily drunk at a beach party, where their classmate David McCarren, whom the boy had previously punched for groping Lilly, claims he’s just had sex with her. Believing David raped Lily, the boy attacks him, leaving him disabled, and is sentenced to three years in prison for aggravated assault. Lily moves on and, years later, falls for her former university professor Marshall Middleton (“His love had an undeniable pull, and maybe even the capacity to extract her from her past”). They marry, but while she’s reeling from the news that Marshall is infertile, she attends her high school reunion and reconnects with her old beau, whom she still calls the boy, now out of prison and living in a sailboat in her hometown, and they have sex. Curtis sustains tension as Lily is tormented by guilt over deceiving Marshall, and she skillfully conveys the power of Lily’s lifetime bond with the boy. This one is book club catnip. Agent: Gráinne Fox, UTA. (Feb.)