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Days of Awe“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, The Washington Post |
Days of Awe on Amazon's Best 100
Days of Awe on Kirkus's Best Fiction of 2015
"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." |
"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." |
"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." |
