Evening Begins the Day

Life is messy and not everything is as it seems. In Jessica Brilliant Keener’s beautifully written new novel, Evening Begins the Day, protagonist Rachel Cohen’s world takes a sharp turn when that messiness hits home. She starts to doubt her own judgment when a phone call from a stranger tests her trust in her husband and their marriage.

On a tip from a Cynthia Meyer, the woman whose foundation funds her environmental work with Boston schoolchildren, Rachel moves into a cottage in a small town outside the city to have time and space to consider her options. The move makes Cynthia and her family Rachel’s new neighbors, and, at first, Rachel feels inadequate compared to how she views their picture-perfect lives: Cynthia, with her successful career in corporate giving; her husband David, a pioneering cancer researcher; and their high-school-age daughter Lauren.

That perfect pretense fractures when an ambulance pulls up in front of the Meyers’ house and Lauren is carried away on a stretcher. Amid the turbulence that follows, Rachel’s and the Meyers’ lives begin to intertwine.

As Rachel comes to know her new neighbors, we do, too, with the book’s point of view expanding to include a cast of complex and interesting characters whose lives intersect in meaningful ways. As the story unfolds, more assumptions fall away, challenging characters’ ideas about themselves, their work, and their roles within their community.

We experience Lauren’s deep concern about the state of the world and the tests of Cynthia and Lauren’s mother-daughter relationship. We meet a committed teacher seeking creative ways to help Lauren and young people like her, along with the soon-to-retire administrator persuaded to take a chance.

A key element in the book is the Jewish ritual of the counting of the Omer, in which the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot are mindfully marked each evening, providing a time of reflection before the start of the next new day. Although Rachel’s relationship to her Judaism has been casual, after an invitation from Cynthia’s husband, she tentatively embraces the counting of the Omer to process her feelings about her husband. From there, the circle grows and the practice becomes a quiet but consequential way for characters to come together to find new understanding of themselves and their relationships with each other.

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.