Sarah O'Connor

“The trick was not to let them see you suffering,” (Foss 142).

There’s too much happening in middle-aged single parent Elin Henriksen’s life. Her distant mother’s health is declining, her teenage daughter Betts is planning on going somewhere but won’t tell Elin where, the new high school principal where she teaches disapproves of how she teaches physics, and now the art gallery in her town is going to be renamed after her late father. Tig Henriksen was a modernist furniture designer whose pieces have a cult following, and the renaming of the art gallery means Elin will have to see her estranged siblings: her singer-songwriter sister Mette and emotionally closed architect brother Caspar. With a party to plan, and her carefully balanced life seemingly falling through her fingers with her only confident a dead physicist Elin speaks to through voice notes on her phone, Elin’s own secrets that she’s been holding on to threaten to explode as they did once years before. What more damage could be done from them? Continue reading