To everyone who knows her, 28-year-old Marcia Gold leads the perfect life. A high school guidance counsellor in 1980 Brooklyn, New York who specializes in helping pregnant teens, Marcia thrives in her work. She also has a handsome, successful boyfriend who has won the approval of her Jewish, Holocaust-survivor family - no easy feat.
However, beneath the shiny surface lurks another reality. Plagued by frightening and debilitating panic attacks brought on by her family's wartime legacy and exacerbated by the Iranian hostage crisis in the news, Marcia becomes convinced that "demons" are occupying her closet and her mind. Determined to keep her terrifying secret life a secret, Marcia is pushed closer and closer to a breaking point. A series of crises finally forces the explosion Marcia can no longer contain. Determined to rid herself of her "demons," she concocts a plan, desperate to be reborn as a new person. Unfortunately, she discovers that her plan creates its own problems. Can she find another path out of her psychic pain, one that will lead her to true normalcy?
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The key eased into the narrow metal slit. 1
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(@AmsterdamPB, 11 April 2020, 410 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 28 August via @RandomTTours)
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I'd zero expectations when I started to read this book. That's usually the best way to really enjoy a book. I thought this was an amazing book. The author uses a third person POV but is so focused on Marcia it felt like a first person narrative. To be honest, I didn't get any real sense Marcia's increasingly fragmented mental health had anything to do with the Holocaust or her family history and legacy, but rather the pressure of her life and being in relationship with a man who doesn't support her and is quite dismissive of her most of the time. Marcia's mental struggles are portrayed very differently than other books I've read with character who have similar struggles. I mean this in a good way. Instead of succumbing to her problems, Marcia faces them head on and decides she needs help and what changes she needs to make in her life to get it. She's an incredibly strong person. I got so lost in Marcia's world I didn't want to leave. This is a remarkable book.
