I read a short blurb about a new book — Waiting to Surface, by Emily Listfield — but haven’t been able to find many reviews of it online yet. It’s about Sarah, a magazine editor whose unhappy sculptor husband,Todd, disappears on a trip, leaving her with a young daughter, Eliza, and few clues to his whereabouts. According to Amazon, "Sarah’s life then spreads out into several directions. Most immediate is the investigation into Todd’s disappearance (suicide is one theory), with a skeptical cop, a kindly private eye and Todd’s ex as its cross-purposed cast. Sarah also navigates infighting among the ambitious and sometimes reptilian magazine staff and meets a caring and handsome new love interest. Not all of these subplots work well together, but the through line—Sarah’s and Eliza’s attempt to find their new normal—does more than its share to carry the book."
From USA Today:
In muted prose, Listfield movingly takes us through Sarah’s day-to-day grief, coupled with her hard-headed determination to figure out what happened to Todd. She juggles her sense of loss, her job and raising a daughter who blames her for her missing dad with the antics of her younger colleagues and her own investigation into her husband’s fate. So far, so good.
But Listfield sinks when she introduces a charming, conveniently divorced single father who happens to fall for Sarah. It’s a distracting and far-fetched development in a book that otherwise makes the implausible achingly real.
This leads me to a question: why do authors feel that readers need to have a love interest to make a book compelling? Do we?
Is a story without a potential new love one without hope? Is the mark of a true tragedy one in which there is no promise of future love? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.