CW: remembering now that there is a relationship that is (non-violently) abusive, sort of early stage emotional, except that it’s choreographed well in advance and there’s never any doubt in your mind that it’ll end well (and it does).
I think this was a Goodreads recommend, in a subgenre I will call “nonetheless, she persisted” (Lessons in Chemistry comes to mind as the most recent example of this genre that I read). I put it on hold on a whim and quite delightfully opened it when I was in no particular rush to get to work and thus was commuting via bus, an option that gets me right to where I need to go without any connections but does take longer–i.e., it’s a perfect opportunity for me to crack open a book and get some serious headway.
Good thing I have an alert set for my stop or I would have missed it. Also, realizing that I was also reading Lessons in Chemistry on the same bus, so clearly the bus commute is the winner.
As the title might suggest, this book is about Commuters–those proper noun creatures of habit who get on the same (or same-ish) trains/buses every day, Monday through Friday, to move themselves from a house to an office and back. Soon, these mythical creatures might go the way of the dodo, hunted out of existence due to WFH and Zoom and millennials requesting walkable urban centers. But for now, they exist, and no where in more numbers than the just-out-the-suburb suburb.
Iona Iverson, the nucleus around which this entire book revolves, is a singularly Eccentric Older Woman, who has built a career out of being a Force of Nature. But now, forces of nature are no longer enough–agony aunt columns need you to be fluent in TikTok and sex positivity, and Iona has not quite kept up with the times. But she never stops at a challenge, and she finds herself a cast of motley characters who (of course) all have troubles of their own which they can fix by talk to one another. And Iona, of course.
It’s your typical multi strand narrative type story, in one sense, but it’s done very well. Even I saw some of the twists coming, and I am infamously naïve when it comes to those. But even when it did, and even though I knew that the book would end with Iona getting her comeuppance, it still kept me on the edge of my (bus) seat–very recommended.