So Much Love

July 31, 2017
This strong debut novel from Rosenblum (who has previously published short fiction collections, including The Big Dream) belongs partly to a recent cluster of captive narratives such as Emma Donoghue’s Room and the television series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but it has a much broader perspective than either of those, observing the effects of kidnapping as they ripple out to people close to the captives and to the wider community. A teenage boy named Donny goes missing in a small town. Catherine Reindeer, a waitress who lives in the same town but doesn’t know him, is oddly preoccupied by thoughts of his fate. One night she is abducted as she leaves the restaurant where she works. This is a broad canvas of a novel that takes in the beautiful mundanity of pre-abduction life, the relentless terror of captivity, and the numb trauma Catherine feels as she tries to adjust to life outside once she is free again. Told from the points of view of multiple characters close to both Catherine and Donny, and Catherine herself, Catherine’s story is interwoven with that of a poet she was studying in an undergraduate English lit class and whose life has many parallels with Catherine’s. The novel is a delicate exploration of the lasting repercussions of the cruelty humans inflict on one another. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic.