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A married couple spirals into midlife crises in Rosenstock’s debut novel.

From the outside looking in, Sarah Goldman and Jared Eisenstadt are living the American dream. They have a nice suburban home and two healthy children, and they pursue careers in solid white-collar industries—Sarah in marketing and Jared in tech. Despite their relative comfort, both are unhappy in their own ways. Sarah, tired of serving her children and husband, feels stuck in her unimpressive job and unable to communicate how she truly feels. In the space this angst creates between her and her husband, an old high school classmate, Zach Glass—with whom she’s maintained an on-again-off-again affair for years—slips into the picture. Though Jared has his suspicions about the affair, he’s preoccupied with the financial crisis he’s brought upon their family. Jared has recently gambled almost all of their entire net worth—a savings of nearly eight million dollars—on a startup whose technology turned out to have been plagiarized, something Jared should have known from his role at work. Now broke and jobless, Jared has only the comfort of his old pal, Tim—who, until recently, was also his boss—to lean on, since he’s unable to be truthful with his own wife about just how bad things have gotten. The one ray of light for Jared is that his newfound unemployment provides him the opportunity to work on “Net Prophet,” software that promises to predict the fate of any couple. The potential dissolution of a long marriage brought on by infidelity and financial strain may not be new territory, and the novel’s characters are certainly recognizable types, but Rosenstock’s prose develops real pathos for her subjects, seen here in Sarah: “I want to go screaming back to the safety of my dull suburban life. But then, there is a small quavering part of me that feels more alive here, every pinch of sorrow jabbing me back to consciousness.” Between the well-developed characters and the compelling tech elements, readers will walk away satisfied.

An engaging take on the pitfalls of modern American marriages.