emily horne

This riff on the It's a Wonderful Life concept never strays too far from the expected. There's a certain fun to seeing Nora's alternate lives, but it gets repetitive fast. The author's preoccupation with the relative flatness of her stomach strikes me as a particularly masculine way of gauging the levels of fitness of the versions of Nora. It is, naturally, the experience of motherhood that almost tips her in to an alternate existence.

I'm not qualified to speak to his treatment of her depression, but I was interested in the fact that the character seemed to stop noticing whether her versions were on antidepressants, only to pick that thread up again at the very end. Whether this is purposeful or shoddy editing, who is to say?

A balance of the bleak and the hopeful. The apartment of the name is by times terrifying and welcoming. I had a typical north american reaction to the protagonist leaving her child alone at home to go out drinking! To be clear this was presented as an anomaly and indication of something like a rock bottom for her.