TIDES :: Sara Freeman

Mara is understandably devastated when her baby is stillborn. Unable to stay put in her grief, particularly when her brother lives just downstairs with his newborn, she leaves her husband takes off to a small beach town where everyone is a stranger and she can disappear ("She could no longer live in this fixed way: with their joy  so firmly lodged beneath her grief."). 

Drinking more than she eats, sleeping where opportunities arise, Mara is intentionally slipping "into a blind spot." As her money disappears and her phone shuts down, Mara's wandering takes on a small sliver of something resembling stability, if you don't look too closely, when she notices a Help Wanted sign in the window of the town wine shop.

The shop owner, Simon, is suffering his own period of loss and instability, as his wife has taken their daughter and left town. As Simon and Mara are pulled to and fro by their lives and circumstances, any sense of loveliness is overshadowed by the feeling that any crumb of good will be washed away.

Sara Freeman's debut is wonderful in spite of, often because of, the overlying sense of doom. In that way it reminded me of Billy O'Callaghan's My Coney Island Baby, in which two lovers meet for what the reader can tell, and they, over the course of the book discover, will be the last time.

Freeman takes Mara to the depths before lifting her enough to explore her past and what brought her to her current state. The writing is often spare and restrained, more impactful and beautiful for it. Freeman's prose often requires a second or third reading just for the pure enjoyment. She has a lovely way with descriptors:

...eyebrows like tadpoles swimming lazily across her forehead.

Still hot into the evening, when the sun is a red face dipping its chin into the water.

The only visible sign of life: a sliver of moon, butcher's hook looking to grab at tender flesh.

And of course passages that allow the reader to feel the tug of grief or pull of some form of recovery, the ongoing tug of war inside Mara:

She is seventeen or forty-seven or somewhere in between. She is the walking dead: the child inside her floating dangerously near the surface, gasping its final breath.

They remind her of childhood, when the world seemed to dangle from a string and adults moved around with their scissors, cutting on a whim.

At her core, in this moment in time, Mara firmly believes that "to hope is to lose." Although a shell of herself, filled with grief and absent hope or caring what befalls her, Mara also radiates a form of strength. Perhaps simply because she's still moving, making even tenuous connections, after the loss she has suffered. Where the tide will take her or shake into or out of her next is a mystery.

Sometimes she wonders what might have happened if she'd been born less flawed, if she'd turned, on occasion, right instead of left. Maybe then she'd be more like [her brother], not a bay stripped bare by the tides, all the scum and rocks and dented plastic bottles on hideous display.

I adored Freeman's writing and her creation of Mara and can't recommend them highly enough. Plus this cover is simply gorgeous. If I were one to do star ratings, Tides would get all the stars.