A review by foggy_rosamund
Gravity Is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty
4.0
I've been reading Jaclyn Moriarty since her first novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia showed up in my local bookshop in 2001. I loved that book, and can still recite pieces of it by heart -- it was one of the first young adult books I read, and I loved the mixture of wittiness and sorrow, and the epistolary style. I can see a number of connections between that novel and Gravity is the Thing. Both delve into the subject of self-help: What is self-help? Can it help us? How does self-help change the way we view the world? Both books also touch on the idea of someone who has disappeared, and on grief, and both also discuss on the subject of flight, and wonder whether humans can fly under their own power. I've seen these themes in various other books by Moriarty, but it's interesting to see the same subjects and motifs crop up over and over in her work.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all: I enjoy the variety of different approaches she takes with the subjects, and the ways in which her perspective and her wit have changed over time. This novel is told from the perspective of Abigail, and includes a large cast of characters -- Abigail's four-year-old son, two prospective boyfriends, an ex-husband, friends and acquaintances, and it is also full of the presence of Abigail's brother, Robert, who vanished without trace when she was sixteen. The book opens with Abigail attending an extremely quirky self-help seminar: she is a former lawyer, café owner, and single mother. The book feels both zany and extremely grounded in reality: the incidents are sometimes dreamlike, but the emotions are raw. I found it compelling and warm-hearted, and it's definitely a book I would recommend, particularly if you need something to distract during COVID-19.
One thing I found slightly odd is that this book is described as her debut novel for adults, but Moriarty wrote an adult novel in 2005 called I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all: I enjoy the variety of different approaches she takes with the subjects, and the ways in which her perspective and her wit have changed over time. This novel is told from the perspective of Abigail, and includes a large cast of characters -- Abigail's four-year-old son, two prospective boyfriends, an ex-husband, friends and acquaintances, and it is also full of the presence of Abigail's brother, Robert, who vanished without trace when she was sixteen. The book opens with Abigail attending an extremely quirky self-help seminar: she is a former lawyer, café owner, and single mother. The book feels both zany and extremely grounded in reality: the incidents are sometimes dreamlike, but the emotions are raw. I found it compelling and warm-hearted, and it's definitely a book I would recommend, particularly if you need something to distract during COVID-19.
One thing I found slightly odd is that this book is described as her debut novel for adults, but Moriarty wrote an adult novel in 2005 called I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes.