Review #4: Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

– George Burns

I found this book while wandering around Chapters with some gift cards burning a hole in my pocket. It was on a whim that I picked it up to read the back, especially considering my burning hatred of biology as a class. I ended up buying it, as I thought it would be a light read to distract me from my day to day life. In that, it succeeded.

The story follows Mira Serafino, an exceptional daughter, wife, mother, and schoolteacher who does her best to be perfect. She sees everything crash down around her when her husband Parker admits that he’s become attached to another woman, and Mira’s daughter Thea refuses to talk to her. Mira drives away, northbound, until her car breaks down in Seattle. She finds herself a job at the Cafe at the Center of the Universe, and stays there, trying to figure out what comes next.

Ultimately, this is a book about family. It’s about the complicated relationships that form when you’re related by blood and memories. To a large degree, the book is about finding a new kind of family in the most unexpected of places.

A lot of this book is about expectations. We force our expectations on one another, and become upset when no one else meets our standards. For whatever twisted reason, we expect that everyone can be perfect – the perfect husband, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter. But the truth is that no one’s perfect. We just have to accept one another’s imperfections, and try to imagine one another complexly. (Yep, Nerdfighter here.) There are a few characters in the novel that come to accept this.

I think the ambiguous mostly-happy ending was the perfect way to go for this novel. There’s nothing guaranteed about the future, and the book manages to capture that. The reader has no idea how Mira’s life ultimately wound up, but she learns to love the person she is, and that’s the best happy ending anyone can hope for.

8/10

My next review will be for Preludes & Nocturnes, which is the first volume of Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. Until then!