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by Jana Casale
Three women confront the compromises they've made to appease the men they love.
Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirty-something lives aren't exactly what they'd imagined. To make ends meet, they decide to rent their extra bedroom to Theo, who charms Joy with his salt-and-pepper hair and adoration of their one-eyed cat. When Annie goes to live with her boyfriend, Theo and Joy settle into a comfortable domesticity. Then Theo brings home Celine, the girlfriend he's never mentioned, who is possibly the most stunning woman Joy has ever seen. Joy resolves to do whatever it takes to hold on to him, falling ever deeper into an emotional hellscape of her own making. She is too obsessed to realize that Celine's beauty doesn't protect her from pain. Haunted by an event from her past, Celine can't escape her shame and finds herself in an endless cycle of self-sabotage.
Annie is baffled by Joy's senseless devotion to Theo, but she's consumed by her own obsessions: she can't stop parsing her commitment-phobic boyfriend's texts in an exhausting mission to maintain his approval. At work, where she fully embraces her natural assertiveness, Annie is a star. But when an anonymous letter lands on her desk accusing her esteemed and supportive boss of sexual misconduct, she is forced to decide who and what she's willing to stand up for.
Perceptive, mordantly funny, and full of heart, How to Fall Out of Love Madly examines women's many relationships—with one another, their mothers, their work, men, and themselves—to reveal their underlying power and complexity. It asks, why do so many smart, compassionate, otherwise empowered women tolerate egregious behavior from the men they love? And what will it take for them to reclaim control?
"Casale illuminates her protagonists' inner worlds with a nearly alarming authenticity. These cis, straight women ... [have] been on both ends of life's most sensitive questions and know that a kind response and an honest one aren't usually the same thing. Many readers will feel seen. It's the excitingly, exhilaratingly tiny and true movements of these women's hearts and minds that will move How to Fall Out of Love Madly solidly into readers' own." —Booklist (starred review)
"Casale's narrative voice is deadpan, funny, and clean without being faux flat or pretentious. Casale is an American Sally Rooney, so smart about friendship and love." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In subtle, exquisitely precise prose, How to Fall Out of Love Madly astounds with its insights about love and the search for meaning and self-acceptance. Everyone who loves Sally Rooney should be reading Jana Casale!" —Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"Jana Casale is a master storyteller—observant, witty, sharp, and funny. How to Fall Out of Love Madly is an honest and compelling look at female friendship, romantic relationships, and infatuation." —Jennifer Close, New York Times bestselling author of Girls in White Dresses and Marrying the Ketchups
This information about How to Fall Out of Love Madly 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.
Jana Casale is the author of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky. She has a BFA in fiction from Emerson College and an MSt in creative writing from Oxford. She currently resides outside Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
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