They don’t teach us that when we’re kids. When we’re little, the routine is a big part of our existence and we rely on it as much as we chafe at its boundaries: on weekdays we wake up and get dressed for school, following a specific route from home to class and back; we meet who we’re supposed to meet when we meet them and homework is done on the dot.  We have a prescribed dinner time, family time and bedtime and our birthdays arrive on schedule every year.  During adolescence we fight to tear up the schedule and we become adults when we realize how our parents fought to keep the reality of change from impinging on our routine.  Adults know the only constant in life is change and to survive they must learn to adapt.  Sometimes in the process they make mistakes but that’s a part of learning to adapt.

This is the undercurrent of Elisabeth Egan’s debut novel, A Window Opens, and her heroine, Alice Pearse, starts the story understanding the need.  As a veteran of the sandwich generation she’s a mom to her children and a daughter of parents who all need her at the same time.  She’s also a loving wife so when her husband’s career takes a radical hit, Alice looks for a full-time job to keep the family income stable and give him the opportunity he needs to re-write his vocational future.  And since Alice believes in the future, she takes a position with one of the new, edgy conglomerates looking to revolutionize the retail experience.

Part of book is focused on the ever-shifting conflict between honoring and trashing the past and one of the comic highlights of A Window Opens captures it in the war between paper and e-books.  Alice’s new employer (no surprise) wants to focus the majority of their product on e-books and comes up with nasty nicknames for the traditional paper-and-spine format  but one of the company perks is each new employee gets a first edition of his/her favorite book.  (I imagined someone offering me that job and then withdrawing the offer after I requested a first edition of Jane Eyre.)  Alice’s choice is there when she starts her job but the book is never really hers.  She can’t take it off the job-site or even read its pages.  The volume must stay wrapped in plastic and under lock and key.  Eventually, Alice has to ask herself: what’s the point of having a book if you’re not allowed to read it?

There are other questions for Alice and some of the answers aren’t that easy but Egan’s best point is about time.   Because of our growing culture people can become almost anything in life they want to be (a parent, an astronaut, a horticulturalist) but no one can be everything, certainly not all at once.  Each life has a limited amount of time and our choices determine how we’ll spend it.  Egan’s advise is to base those decisions on who and what we love, mindful that any choice closes some doors.  That’s not as grim as it sounds, as my mom used to say.  Whenever circumstance closes a door, somewhere A Window Opens.

Elisabeth Egan’s A Window Opens will go on sale in August of this year.  My thanks to NetGalley for sharing a copy of this with me for review purposes