For fans of Celeste Ng and Mary Beth Keane comes an impeccably paced and transfixing debut novel that “vividly renders the messiness of a single human life in all its joy and heartbreak” (Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author). It’s 5 p.m. on a Wednesday when Emma settles into her hometown bar with a motley crew of locals, all unaware that a series of decisions over the course of a … series of decisions over the course of a single night is about to change their lives forever. As the evening unfolds, key details about Emma’s history emerge, and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train.
Why has Emma, a powerhouse in the business world, ended up here? What is she running away from? And what is she willing to give up to recapture the love she once cherished?
A “crisp, haunting, and intelligent” (Stephen Markley, author of Ohio) exploration of modern love, guilt, and the place we call home, Ordinary Hazards follows one woman’s epic journey back to a life worth living.
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This story begins at 5:00 pm on a Wednesday at a small town bar aptly named The Final Final. Emma has taken her seat among the regulars and it’s less than a year since her divorce from the man who she met and gained her acceptance there. Her sadness is obvious as she reflects on the people and the journey to this moment. Over the course of the next six hours, the lives of everyone there will be dramatically changed forever.
It’s solely Emma’s point of view as she goes back and forth in time to provide a sense of self, setting and local color, including a perspective of those regulars at the bar, relating vignettes about each. These stories gave me a certain clarity about them. I didn’t always know where it was leading, so much so that I struggled to figure out the point. But gradually the eloquence of the writing overwhelmed that need and I just listened. We know something terrible happened to Emma but that isn’t revealed early on. We also don’t know what destroyed her marriage. We just know there were events that created her current state. There’s an unevenness in the telling but somehow that began to make sense.
There is a lot of sadness for most of the story but the threat of joy and light emerging was always in the air. I’m not advocating patience as much as I am stillness and careful attention. The ending, in particular, should be read or listened to intently because it is the culmination of everything that preceded it and every word matters. I opted for the audio version and the narrator delivered a solid performance but I had a tough time knowing the difference between past and present transitions. I actually borrowed the eBook just to read the last two chapters. Fortunately, I’ll be discussing this story with my book club because there’s so much to consider. It’s hard to grasp that this is a debut novel. This is special.
(Thanks to Simon & Schuster Audio for my complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.)
Song/s the book brought to mind: Small Town USA by Justin Moore
Ordinary Hazards by Anna Bruno is a book about nothing and everything at the same time. It takes place over the course of just a few hours, but much of it is Emma reflecting on her life and how she got to where she is at this moment in the small-town bar The Final Final. I love how Bruno slowly unraveled Emma’s past while also weaving in her present at the bar. There is a little bit of action which mostly takes place towards the end, but other than that not a whole lot happens. Usually I wouldn’t necessarily like a book like this, but for some reason it just worked with this one.
The end of Ordinary Hazards is a real tearjerker and even though I knew it was inevitable, I still ended up shedding tears. I definitely think the pacing is slow, but overall it still moved at a nice enough clip that I wasn’t bored while reading it. In fact, I didn’t want to stop reading and I could have read it in one sitting if I would have had the time. If you like a good, character-driven slow burn then this is the book for you. It’s an impressive debut and I can’t wait to see what Bruno writes next!
Thank you to the publisher for my advance review copy via NetGalley. All opinions and thoughts are my own.
I think the thing that I disliked most about this book was that the narrative takes place over one evening. The characters were shallow and I just could not connect with them. Plus you factor in the ramblings that played a primary role throughout the book, and I was just over it. Just a very depressing read that never managed to catch my attention.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.
Ordinary Hazards is a devastating slow burn of a book. It’s rare to read a novel that takes such an unflinching look at grief, self-recrimination, and the way people try to put themselves back together after loss. Heavy topics are handled with a light touch.
What a deeply affecting, moving story from Anna Bruno about love, loss, consequences, and hope.
You spend an evening with Emma, a financial wunderkind living in a small, almost claustrophobic college town, as she sits at a bar often frequented by her ex-husband Lucas, imbibing whiskey after whiskey while contemplating how she arrived at this point in her life. Her thoughts take her from the present in the bar, where she encounters people who “must know things about Lucas I can’t even imagine,” to the past, showing you her career, friendships, coworkers, marriage, and family.
Emma has suffered a devastating loss, and that suffering led her to take a pair of scissors to her life and cut out anything she deems worthy of blame. As she works her way through her feelings, she turns a gimlet eye to her choices and decisions. She is self-aware enough to acknowledge her own culpability, which made me like her all the more. She doesn’t try to spin glowing accolades of herself. If anything, she becomes increasingly wistful and regretful. But what will she do about that? For all of her inaction during the hours she spends at the bar, you sense that Emma is very much a woman who moves, who achieves.
This is not a book where big things happen. It unfolds steadily and quietly, sometimes breaking your heart and sometimes filling you with hope. Anna Bruno makes you feel like you are there in that bar with Emma, listening to her narration, offering her support and encouragement.
I look forward to Anna Bruno’s next book.
Oh my goodness but this was a devastatingly beautiful book. I had no idea, for the longest time, where exactly things were going – it wasn’t a bad thing though, because I could tell we were on a journey somewhere, I just wasn’t entirely sure where, and the writing was so gorgeous that I was more than happy to go along for the ride… when we finally arrived it was startling and stunning and I literally could not turn pages fast enough to see where the train wreck would take me next.
This is a story about pain and survival and the families we make for ourselves – the writing is astonishingly good and the emotion is heartbreakingly real. From devastation to delight, every emotional aspect covered in this book resonated like a gong had been struck next to my head… I must have highlighted descriptions of feelings and turns of phrase every five pages – Bruno is a master at the manipulation of language to bare the naked desperation of emotional struggle without ever feeling maudlin or overdrawn.
The book was a marvelous, haunting, painful delight of a read and I cannot wait to see what she comes up with next!!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.
Ordinary Hazards is a novel about life with all of its hopes, regrets, dreams, ambitions, love, friendship, risks taken, and chances passed by.
Emma sits down in the Final Final local bar at 5 PM and stays there until past closing, trying to drink away her regrets and make some sense of her life. How did all the happiness she had slip away when she wasn’t looking? Why did her decisions seem so right and invigorating at the time and so meaningless now? Is it possible to get her life back on track after what’s happened? Should she even try?
The Final Final is a bar where everyone is a regular; but it is not her bar, she is accepted only because she was once married to Lucas, one of the regulars. Set in a small town where everyone has known everyone for years and everyone knows everyone else’s business, the reader uncovers through Emma’s musings and the chatter of the other customers an event that changed everything for them all. But the night is young, and there is far more to come. Little do they realize that their lives will all be changed again.
This story is character based and takes place over the course of one night. I was surprised to learn this is a debut novel for the author; she is definitely one to watch! A bit depressing in these already dark times (thanks pandemic!), but a solid read.
My thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for allowing me to read a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. All opinions stated here are my own.
3.75/5
This was a tough read for me in several ways.
It’s the story of Emma, a 30-something hedge fund genius, who is self-destructing. She is spending most of her time drinking to dull tremendous loss(es), guilt, blame and depression.
It’s a bit of a downer to read, and I wasn’t a fan of the abrupt skipping around in time to gain the backstory. Overall it’s written well, but I wish I had connected better with the characters.
Thanks to #NetGalley and #Atria for providing me the ARC. The opinions are strictly my own.
272 pages
2 stars
Another reviewer said it best: “ This book is boring.”
I didn’t like Emma. Her self-pity party was too much to bear. The book jumped around without warning. The transitions were poor, so many times I found myself lost. The other patrons in the bar were disagreeable. I did like the bar tender, however. She seemed to be the only one who was on the ball.
I found the whole book depressing and I struggled to finish it.
I want to thank NetGalley and Atria Books for forwarding to me a copy of this book for me to read and review.