Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley: book review
Overview: Jane and Dan's marriage is on the rocks by their nineteenth wedding anniversary. When Dan wins a reservation to the most exclusive restaurant in Southern California, they break their tradition of going to Macaroni Grill to have a date night surrounded by celebrities and billionaires. Jane's plan to ask for a divorce makes the dinner tense, but this is escalated when the restaurant is taken hostage by terrorists. As the night goes on, Jane starts to realize this terror plot feels exceedingly familiar as she starts to put the pieces together back to her only published novel from six years ago. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 Jane's voice is the strongest in the book. The chapters alternate between her perspective and Dan's, and a part of me wishes that she'd just stuck to Jane's because it feels so much more embodied than Dan's. Still, that balance doesn't really detract from the story because there's a lot going on between the terror plot, what's driving Jane's desire for divorce and drive to reclaim her identity, and so many complicated parenting feelings. It's the characters that ground the novel. Jane has been a stay at home mom for twenty years and her kids are starting to leave home, making Jane feel adrift. The book spends a surprising amount of time focused on Jane's experience with parenting, identity, motherhood, and marriage in a thoughtful way. It also reflects on parenting when kids become adults and how difficult that is to manage. There's an important scene where Jane is left to face the idea that some of her daughter's performance and choices might have been driven by Jane's wants more than her daughter's, and she has to reconcile pushing Sissy towards what's best for her with letting her be her own person. I guess since I'm on the other side of this as a kid that's having to start making my way in the world on my own as an adult and seeing how difficult it can be for moms when that kid role is vacated, this definitely pulled at my heartstrings.
Plot: 4 This book is a fast paced whirlwind. While the first 2 chapters of set-up are a bit slow and stilted, it picks up fast and never stops running. Oakley threads the emotional conflict through with plenty of external forces as the inexperienced terrorists bumble their way through taking hostages. This is the kind of high stakes book that I love where it's not a true mystery or thriller so there's a lot of action without any of the actual nail-biting, anxiety inducing feeling of reading true genre fiction. This is more about balancing action with a deep emotional core, which is much more my speed.
I will say, the resolution, for how much time is spent in the book stressing about what the outcome will be with the police, left something to be desire. Oakley chooses to time hop over the details of how exactly everything was gotten away with when she reveals the characters' end point in the book, and I understand the desire to skim as an author, but I wish she would've gone for it. The exclusion almost felt cut for time. But I read the whole 368 page book over 2 days, with 75% of it on day 2 for reference of how fast of a read this is, so it could've withstood a few extra pages.
Writing: 4 Oakley is an author I love returning to. I discovered her last year with The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, which I recommended a ton and was kind of my commercial fiction favorite of 2024. While I think I might have enjoyed the dynamics of that book slightly more just because of its unique inter-generational focus, Oakley has really carved out a lane of pulling together some genre elements with heists and hostages and other big ticket plot items and managing to expertly give them a deep emotional core and characters whose learning and development from the situation is just as important as whether the big plot beat goes right. It appeals to my sensibilities loving the character work of literary fiction while also wanting something more fun and light from time to time. Oakley writes compulsively recommendable books, the kind that are easy to hand to literally anyone with little information and know that they'll have a good time, and I think that's a great niche to be in.
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