Escape

by Barbara Delinsky

[Leah]

As soon as I saw the book cover for Escape for Barbara Delinsky I knew I had to have it. Sometimes a book cover just captures you and Escape more than did that. Escape’s cover really captured me, showing a girl against a darkish blue city backdrop and I was sold. The synopsis helped that along, because the synopsis sounded awesome – I love novels where people escape their lives, where they reinvent their lives or just try to make sense of the ones they had and Escape seemingly promised all of that so I deftly downloaded it onto my Kindle and let me tell you, I was not disappointed.

Escape starts with quite a bang. So many books I read these days take a little while to warm up – they feel the need to introduce us to everyone before the main event can begin, but in Escape, Emily escapes literally five pages into the novel. We meet her as she’s about to go to work one morning and as she ticks off her minutes and allots minutes to certain activities, you can feel the pressure building. Feel her ready to explode and as she finds herself sitting talking to a client who’s had a miscarriage after drinking some dodgy water, she starts to wonder why, as a lawyer, she’s stuck in a cubicle wondering how much money the lady should get for her dead child, when she snaps and leaves. It’s sudden and it’s unexpected the way Emily withdraws money from the bank, the way she backs some clothes and writes her husband a note, the way she just… drives off. But it was also awesome.

I like a book that doesn’t mess about, that gets straight down to the good stuff. It gets the heart pumping, at least metaphorically speaking. I thought the plot was excellent. Not only did it start well, but the plot continued to be excellent throughout as Emily found herself back in Bell Valley, the place where she’d spent a wondrous summer as a teenager before never setting foot in the place again. I liked how Emily had to claw back the friendships she’d left behind way back then and how she had to try to figure out her life now, in New York. Why it was that she could so easily up and leave her husband without a second thought and although I found the whole coyote aspect to the plot to be a bit too OTT, and that I could easily have done without it, it didn’t defer my enjoyment of the novel.

Despite the fact that Emily runs out on her husband without giving him a second thought, I did find myself liking her. I can understand her need to escape. Heck, don’t we all at one point of the day/week/month/year wish we could just up and leave our current lives for something better? To have some freedom, some breathing room? That’s what resonates with Emily, that she did that and a lot of people reading the book will admire her chutzpah. I know I did. I liked seeing how Emily grew in Bell Valley, how she worked through what her life had become and how she realised that being back in Bell Valley would be the key to unlocking everything. I found the characters fascinating, particularly Vickie Bell, Emily’s best friend. It was very much a novel I easily found myself escaping to (excuse the pun).

I must admit, when I thought of writing this review I wasn’t sure what to say but it’s flown out of me. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. It had everything I wanted and despite some odd niggles – the coyotes, the lack of blame apportioned to Jude at the end of the novel when he was a bit of an idiot. There was more to the novel than Emily’s escape and Emily’s troubles as the Bell Valley natives had their own troubles, too, and I found Lee’s story in particular fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I found the characters to be fascinating, I thought the plot was inspired and I stayed up until almost 1am finishing the novel up as it was a very high-tempo end to the novel, with lots of action. I very much recommend Escape, it was a brilliant book and I very much look forward to what Barbara releases next, I’ll be definitely purchasing it, that’s for sure.