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A Novel
by Anna Montague
For fans of Less and Remarkably Bright Creatures comes a funny and moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an unlikely road trip.
Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She's mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara's prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara's possessions. She's fine.
But in going through Sara's old journal, Magda discovers her friend's last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda's upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara's urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she's been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women's retreat meant to "unleash one's divine feminine energy" in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.
As the trip shakes up her careful routines, Magda finally faces longings she locked away years ago and confronts questions about her sexuality and identity she thought she had long put to rest. And as she soon learns, it's never too late to start your next journey.
"Tender but assured...This book will be popular in public libraries. The characters are crisply written and engaging; hand to readers who enjoyed Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Delightful...This earnest road novel has plenty of appeal." —Publishers Weekly
"Montague portrays Magda's slow journey to self-acceptance and actualization with sensitivity and sketches out the social, familial, and professional forces that have been roadblocks along the way." —Kirkus Reviews
"Montague's debut novel imparts an affecting journey into the tricky bonds of grief and aging alongside the rewards of self-discovery." —Booklist
"Anna Montague explores friendship, aging, grief, regret and love with both creative and contemplative depth in her noteworthy debut." —BookPage
"At once tender and hilarious, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is a beautifully written and moving novel of loss and new beginnings." —Jonas Jonasson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
"A road trip novel with a tremendous amount of heart - I ached along with the characters, rooted for them, wished them all the best. Truly a novel that asks you to consider the winding, secret path to love that sits lodged in every person's breast. Anna Montague has written something bright and lovely here, a novel that is above all quietly beautiful." —Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
"I love therapy and books about therapists, so this warm and witty debut novel won me completely. I loved Magda Eklund's journey of grief and wonderment." —Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters and Lovers and Liars
This information about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anna Montague is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is her first novel.
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