A college professor loses her husband in a tragic accident and struggles to piece together a shattered life.

Laura Chason is a precocious child whose intelligence is honored by her loving Jewish family by allowing her—when only 8 years old—to pose the traditional four questions at their Passover Seder. She also asks a fifth question—she wonders why some of her friends do not mark Passover—which establishes the tradition of the fifth question each year. This intellectual curiosity, particularly about diverse cultures other than her own, becomes the hallmark of Laura’s life and drives her to study sociology in college. Even after she falls in love with Jake Kendler and marries him, she remains doggedly devoted to her work; in fact, both of them are so career-oriented they decide not to have children. But after 10 years of blissful marriage, catastrophe strikes: Jake is killed in a car accident, a loss that buries Laura in “unrelenting grief,” which is poignantly portrayed by Cohen. Laura finds some solace in daily services at her synagogue but mostly copes with her sadness by her dedication to work, eventually becoming an established academic. The author depicts her attempt to return to some measure of emotional normality and “to acquire a life without Jake’s absence being the focus of my existence.” Cohen’s work is quietly limpid—she prefers plain, foursquare language that borders on the stylistically banal. Her sensitivity is impressive—Laura is neither broken nor quite whole, a woman determined to intelligently craft a new life with new joys. However, the story can become too sentimentally earnest in its labored attempts to manufacture a moral lesson: “Laura was a fortunate woman, in that she was able to eventually accept the devastating fate…that had been unexpectantly thrust upon her. However…she was inclined to alter her destiny, by deciding to change the predictable patterns of her life.” A less didactic tone would have made this novel much more readable.

A treacly tale weighed down by moralism.

A New York City teacher sustains a long-term relationship with a French doctor over several decades in this novel.

Brooklyn-born Adina Saville discovered back in junior high school that two of her friends shared the same birthday with her and were born in the same hospital. The astonishing coincidence is repeated several times, with a New York University friend and even one of Adina’s doctors. During a semester abroad at the Sorbonne, she finds that a Swedish friend also has the same birthday and joins this close-knit group. Something else changes in Paris, though, as Adina meets Tristan, a physician who becomes her long-distance partner over many years. Back in New York, Adina works as a French teacher at the Dalton School, a prestigious Manhattan institution. The group of friends, all of whom have first names that start with the letter A, meets semiregularly. (“They believed in signs and thought there was certainly some divine intervention that had eventually brought them all together.”) Well-liked at work, happy in her Upper East Side one-bedroom apartment, and content spending summers with Tristan in France, Adina eschews marriage and kids. Some of her friends question that decision, but her biggest battle comes when Adina receives a breast cancer diagnosis, which becomes the hardest challenge of her life. Cohen has an intriguing premise for her enjoyable novel and is consistently upbeat in the way she characterizes the life and times of Adina’s unique circle of friends. The author is similarly unwavering in describing the breast cancer fight and the remarkable dedication to Tristan over so much time. But this is a lengthy story, and covering a lifetime of news and events among so many characters eventually becomes unwieldy. Cohen delivers updates rather than having one main plotline that forms the emotional core of the tale.

A pleasant, sprawling story that details an admirable life but needs a more focused plot.

Debut novelist Cohen’s heroine, Mara Berg, is a self-sufficient math teacher with a pattern of meeting men unwilling to commit.

When the end of an unsatisfying stop-and-start relationship of seven years coincides with a new teaching assignment at Franklin High School, Mara takes it as a chance for a fresh start. While Franklin presents exciting teaching challenges and new friendships, it also comes with an unfortunate relationship prospect in Jack Holden, a well-liked history teacher. Jack is older, charismatic, and married, and of course Mara falls for him. They begin an affair that fulfills Mara’s need for physical passion just as strongly as it threatens her peace of mind. The math teacher always considered herself an independent woman—she happily pays her own way and has little desire for a traditional marriage or family—so, in some ways, a noncommittal fling suits her just fine. At the same time, she can’t shake her need for more than the intermittent rendezvous that Jack schedules at his convenience. Though unsettled by the way she is beholden to Jack, Mara can’t bring herself to end the affair, which drags on for 30 years. Mara is a warm protagonist who easily invokes the reader’s sympathy, but her indecision when it comes to Jack ultimately rankles. Over the course of the narrative, Mara moves house, changes jobs, and faces the death of both of her parents, but her dominant concern remains her lover, whose inconstant presence provides just enough heat to keep her hungry for more. While Mara decides many times to break things off, the plot remains at an uncomfortable stalemate as she’s drawn back into the affair over and over. Mara’s eventual moment of new self-awareness is welcome and brings fresh energy to the story, but it is not a strong enough gesture to balance her ambivalence throughout the rest of the plot. The text could also have used a little more polish, as numerous grammatical and spelling errors make for a distracting reading experience.

An unsatisfying narrative of a woman whose final transformation is too little, too late.