Livvy Takes The Long Way
by Elsa KurtPublish: Apr 02, 2016Women's Fiction Literary Fiction Book Overview
"That look. I can feel your eyes on me. Those boring brown eyes. I hate your face. I do. You keep looking at me and all I can I think is, I hate your face. But I don’t glance up. I don’t say that. I never say the thoughts in my head. The oscillating fan blows one strand of flyaway hair in my face and I re-tuck it for the hundredth time. I should switch seats, but it'll only provoke him more. It's hot. Shirt-sticking, sweat-beading kind of hot, the kind not usually synonymous with mid-May. I lift my eyes up in time to see a shiny bead of sweat roll down his temple. The central air broke last August. No one will come out to fix it until mid-June because I forgot to call the guy back in March like he told me to. Thanks to this week’s unexpected high temps, he hasn’t let me forget that fact. Why let it go when he can come up with a thousand ways to remind me I screwed up? My husband is not the kind of man who lets anything go..."So begins Livvy's story. Livvy Handler is at the crossroads of her life. Married to a man she now can't recall ever loving, although she must have. She must have believed she did. How could she have gotten here - at this precipice - otherwise? Livvy knows she has to get out, but that word - how, how, how - repeats like an endless echo in her mind. She's trapped in a gilded cage of her own design, her own choices. Or is she? When a face from the past returns, Livvy comes to believe it might be the sign she's waited and longed for; her path to freedom from a man who tears her down as if for sport. Should she takes the fork in the road that leads to who-knows-where, or stay on the one paved with unhappiness but safety and familiarity? Tread water for the sake of her child, or swim fast and hard to a new life? These are the private dilemmas of a woman quietly breaking down. It's also the metamorphosis of a woman discovering her worth, realizing her strength, and finding her way. It's a story for any woman traveling the hard road, fear and doubt lodged firmly in heart, but undeterred and head held high. And it's the story for any woman who thinks she can't...
