Review: Look at Me Now by Thomas Hubschman

This novel opens with Deirdre making the final preparations to leave her husband. He has been mentally and emotionally abusive to her for years but she has been trapped in her marriage by her feelings that she deserved her situation after getting pregnant and having to marry while still in high school. Deirdre's life has been a fairly pitiable one; she's essentially friendless, stuck in a dead-end job, trying to extricate herself from a loveless marriage, distant from her emotionally frozen mother, even unconnected from her lover. Certainly this all should combine to make the reader cheer her on as she starts a new life for herself. But it doesn't. Perhaps it is her all pervading depression leaking through or perhaps it is the small ways in which Deirdre is not entirely convincing as a woman but connecting with this character is difficult. Her life is so dreary that reading about it becomes a dispiriting adventure. And Deirdre's odd decisions, to pretend a closeness to the paraplegic wife of her super, a woman she's never met, her decision to visit and care for her abusive ex-husband after he lands in the hospital, and other assorted small choices like these do not serve to make the reader understand her better but only add some movement into an essentially stagnant story. Over all, I was greatly disappointed by this book.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of this book to review.