Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney: book review
Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney Overview: One day, a woman wakes up in the morning and decides not to turn right and go to work. Instead, she goes left to the seaside town she grew up in that she hasn't seen in years. From there, she continues making choices that push her further afield from the Dublin suburb she lives in, from the family she's raised to maturity and the husband who sends impatient texts about wanting his gym bag brought to him. The book is told in a vignette style that plays with linear time. Each cluster of vignettes is arranged by the general place she's in where the majority of the scenes take place—the town, the boat, the train, the bus, the breakfast room of the hotel, etc. But she also dips heavily into memory and pulls us forward into her present time, working to contextualize these near term memories as she tells this story of her escape from regular life that is at once extremely mundane and truly wild. Overall: 5 Characters: 5 We are deep inside this...