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Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) is a master at portraying the intersection of one's expectations for oneself and what one has actually achieved. Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old schoolteacher in Cambridge, Mass., long ago abandoned her ambition to make her living as an artist and has become the titular "woman upstairs." As Messud writes, "You don't make a mess and you don't make mistakes and you don't call people weeping at four in the morning. You don't reveal secrets it would be unseemly for you to have. You turn forty and you laugh about it...."
Then, one day, a beautiful little eight-year-old boy, Reza Shadid, walks into her classroom and her life is forever changed. He and his parents are so exotic, so "other" from Nora's tidy, predictable life that she is transformed by their presence. Reza's father, Skandar, is a dashing Lebanese scholar in Boston on a Harvard fellowship; his mother, Sirena, is a glamorous Italian artist.
After Reza is attacked by a bully who calls him a terrorist, Nora is drawn, inexorably, into the Shadids' complex lives. She falls in love with all of them, as individuals and as a family. Seeing in Sirena all that she might have been, she renews her interest in art, and she and Sirena rent a studio together.
In the end, there is a betrayal of such magnitude that it is hard to imagine. Messud's prose is flawless, her portrayal of each character spot on. Nora's intensity, both in her love for the Shadids and in her rage at the end, are absolutely believable and leave the reader hoping that she will succeed on her own terms. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.