Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time

In Brown’s appealing debut, a poet turned suburban mom’s midlife crisis is amplified by the news that she has one year left to live. On Olivia Strauss’s 39th birthday, her best friend Marian gifts her a test from a new age center in New York City that purports to predict the exact date of one’s death. The test’s devastating and unexpected result puts the unhappy elements of Olivia’s life into stark relief. Worn out from the unsatisfying high-school teaching job she took after abandoning her poetry career, and bored by her routine life with her husband, Andrew, and their five-year-old son, Olivia seeks to reaffirm her sense of self. She goes for runs, writes poetry again, schedules date nights with Andrew, and ventures into the city for concrete answers from the place where she took the test, but the mystery only deepens. In a twist, it turns out the predicted death might not be Olivia’s, but someone else’s in her circle. While the tone remains frothy, Brown gives serious consideration to the questions her conceit raises about death and “what it might mean if it really was only a few months away.” There’s a genuine feeling of hope in Brown’s enjoyable first outing. (Jan.)