Days of Awe (Fox)

Book Reviews
What's wonderful about reading a novelist's books in back-to-back sequence is that you witness the writer grow not gradually, but seemingly overnight.... Fox's latest novel, Days of Awe...treads on new territory: parenthood, loss and death.... Fox paints touching portraits of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Helene has a wonderful verve.... Iz wins the reader's sympathy by continually putting herself out there.... Careful and nuanced.
Patricia Park - New York Times Book Review


Darkly hilarious…. Fox is a master of emotional misdirection, and what she presents here tastes like carbonated grief, an elixir of sorrow gassed up with her nervous humor… With Days of Awe, Fox has created a winding internal monologue as Isabel tries to catch her bearings in a world that suddenly seems out of kilter…. Leavened with wry silliness that fans will remember from Fox’s previous novels, Friends Like Us and Still Life with Husband… [Isabel is] an extremely endearing narrator, the kind of woman who makes straight-faced jokes that her uptight colleagues don’t get, and then feels both superior and mortified…. There are veins of Anne Lamott running through these pages, a sweet blend of sentimentality and wit… And Fox is a great comic on the subject of aging, too. Her narrator wears sweatpants that are "a blend of cotton and self-loathing." She could be channeling Nora Ephron…. Surprisingly buoyant.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


The hands of time stop for no one, not even Lauren Fox. With each new novel, the characters of this irrepressibly comedic chronicler of friendship, marriage and romantic foibles among white Milwaukeean Generation X-ers advance and mature in concert with their author. And yet her prose remains as fresh as if it spritzed from the wordsmith’s fountain of youth. With Days of Awe, however, Fox’s insouciance is tempered by an omnipresent awareness of "that cold lick of mortality...." The fearlessness with which Fox frees her women to behave badly heightens both the credibility and the pleasure of her fiction.
Jan Stuart - Boston Globe


As Fox deconstructs the myth of perfect womanhood, her humor and humanity remind us that love’s the only lifeboat through grief. (Book of the Week)
People


Days of Awe will keep you reading… Fox's previous novels, Still Life With Husband and Friends Like Us,  were celebrated for witty and intelligent examinations of friendship and marriage. Days of Awe is no exception.
Mary Ann Grossman - St. Paul Pioneer Press  


Her latest work explores the ever-shifting landscape of a woman in her 40s with the same sly humor and snappy dialogue that has made Fox one of my favorite novelists to recommend… Days of Awe is an examination of grief and how one can move past it, or at least make it through each day without succumbing to its persistent demands.
Meganne Fabrega - Minneapolis Star Tribune


Lauren Fox ... takes women who are falling apart and pulls wit, snark, pith, and occasional insight out of them. No contemporary novelist makes me stop as often to mark or admire one of her sentences. Plenty of people can write limpid or fancy prose, but Fox ladles out one flavorful reduction ... after another.... Days of Awe draws its title from the period of the solemn introspection urged upon Jews between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, though Fox's narrator, Isabel Applebaum Moore, also experiences gentler moments of wonder and appreciation.... Were Days of Awe the pilot script for a TV series, elderly actresses would throw elbows to audition for Helene... Poignant.
Jim Higgins - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


[A] tale about a woman’s attempt to piece her life together following the death of her best friend.... Isabel’s nuanced character is relatable—her struggles are universal and the reader will root for her to succeed. Raw and darkly humorous at times, Fox’s novel is a winner.
Publishers Weekly


An insightful novel by Lauren Fox that explores how grief can make every arena of life feel suddenly disorienting… Humor brings levity to Fox's frank, thought-provoking story that adds surprising depth and meaning, layer upon layer, page by page… Fox once again explores, with a smart and refreshing perspective, the underside of friendships, marriage, love and loss—and the range of emotions that can plague and liberate the human heart.
Kathleen Gerard - Shelf Awareness


[Fox] has such an offbeat way of looking at things that you'll eagerly keep reading just to see what she's going to say next. Read it for the magnetic voice and Fox's ever interesting perspective on work, love, friendship, and parenthood—because, really, what else is there?
Kirkus Reviews