October 1, 2025
Elizabeth Geoghegan has put together a beautiful collection of unsatisfying personal relationships, or certainly the ones that linger in your memory for years, reminding you of loss or failure in your life. What makes these stories powerful isn’t just the heartbreak, but how Geoghegan shows feelings like longing, loneliness, and the middle ground between closeness and separation.
Her stories capture moments that feel familiar but are rarely talked about. And her characters often find themselves in the middle of emotional imbalance, like when love doesn’t match up, when the romantic timing is off, or the person you care about simply doesn’t feel the same way. In “Tree Bay,” for example, the narrator realizes her crush doesn’t like her back. Geoghegan shows that painful truth not through a big argument, but through silence, body language, and emotional distance.
In “The Violet Hour,” a woman is dumped just before she flies out to meet her lover. The rejection hurts even more because she had been hopeful and excited. These stories aren’t about huge tragedies, but about small heartbreaks that still leave a lasting mark and change how we think about love and self-worth.
Geoghegan creates wonderful, tangible moments, too. “Everything felt exaggerated — the summer heat and the strength of the drinks and even the relentless rain — as if they were characters in a modernist novel, except they were in Italy, not France,” she writes. In just a few lines, she captures the sense of place, a romantic movie-like setting that’s ironically tied to her own disappointment. Her settings, be they Rome, the Mediterranean coast, the U.S’s scattered corners, are described carefully, with a painterly eye.
Her stories are not all about failed relationships. “A Roman Story,” an especially haunting one, details the horrifying act of a father throwing his baby from a bridge. This act is how the story begins. From there, the narrative moves backward, exploring why it happened. It’s dark and unsettling, showing how tragedy can build slowly over time, and it fits with the book’s larger theme: how people deal with pain and disappointment.
The final story, “Eightball,” expertly weaves the past and present as the narrator watches her brother fall apart while remembering their shared childhood. It’s a sad and loving story about how family can both comfort and hurt us, and about the longing that never fully goes away.
Throughout the book, Geoghegan captures messy emotions and complicated lives: the missed calls, the love that isn’t returned, and the quiet embarrassment of wanting something more than someone can give.
The story, “Dog Boy,” is the only story that feels like a departure, though, in tone and language. It’s rough and raw. And it’s the only piece, in my opinion, that doesn’t fully align with the elegance that defines the other stories. Still, Elizabeth Geoghegan is a wonderful, lyrical writer, and this collection is a rewarding read.
Buy the book at indie booksellers, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Review by Cetywa Powell