Cara Blue Adams's debut story collection, You Never Get It Back, is a modern look at one woman's coming-of-age experience, notably tinged with the gradual loss of youthful optimism and expectations.
Beginning at the turn of the millennium, narrator Kate stumbles through new adulthood. She is often observing her life from above, not present or engaged but distant, judgmental. This occasional disconnect is reflected in the author's choice to present the stories from various points of view, usually in third person, but sometimes second person.
While the baker's dozen individual stories are markedly different, they are all characterized by a growing patina of disillusionment, grief or ennui. Kate writes to the much older professor with whom she had an affair; recounts a night out with a friend's ex that ends in sexual assault, which she refuses to name as such; and meets an elderly painter losing his sight while she attempts to write at an artists' residency. The stories are linear, following Kate from her early 20s to her mid-30s, but Adams leaves gaps of months or years between them, letting readers wonder about these stretches of time.
Kate's love and professional lives are gray, muddy in the way real life tends to be. Readers will sense that she wants nothing so much as for someone to tell her what to do, what will--finally--make her happy. Readers will easily connect to Kate's confusion, yearning as she does for answers and finding few. --Suzanne Krohn, librarian and freelance reviewer