Aug 8

Aug 8 Ordinary Hazards

Author: Anna Bruno
Publisher: Atria Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

“Seen through keen eyes and full of deep feeling, Ordinary Hazards delves into the psyche of a woman grappling with grief, loss, and the burdens of inheritance. Anna Bruno vividly renders the messiness of a single human life in all its joy and heartbreak.” —Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestseller

For fans of Celeste Ng and Claire Messud comes an impeccably paced and transfixing debut novel about how life’s little decisions can ultimately yield the most powerful consequences.

The Final Final is the kind of bar that doesn’t exist in cities, a peculiarity of a small town that has seen better days. It is so called because it’s the last bar on the edge of town. The final stop after the final stop: The Final Final.

It is 5 pm and Emma has settled into her hometown bar for the evening, nine months after her divorce from Lucas, a man she met in this very room on a blind date orchestrated by the very locals who now surround her. As she observes their banter and reminisces, key facts about her history begin to emerge, and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train.

Why has Emma, a powerhouse in the business world, ended up here? What is she running away from? And what is she willing to give up in order to recapture the love she has lost? As she teeters on the edge of oblivion, becoming more booze-soaked by the hour, Emma’s night begins to spin out of control.

A meditation on contemporary love, loss, and the place we call home, and in the tradition of Ask Again, Yes and Little Fires Everywhere, Ordinary Hazards follows Emma’s epic night of finding her way back to a life worth living.

TL;DR Review

Ordinary Hazards was a beautiful, heartbreaking novel about community and tragedy and hope and love and found family.

For you if: You love a good, quotable contemporary fiction that squeezes the heart.

Full Review

“Essentially, the saying is misleading because the last straw is not incremental. It isn’t just one more straw. It is the straw that reveals and magnifies all the straws. It is the moment when attention is drawn to everything that’s been carried — every wrong, every hurt, every loss. And the camel breaks.”

First of all, big thanks to Atria Books for granting me an advanced copy of this book via Netgalley. I loved it so much that I absolutely jumped on the chance to order a signed physical copy from the launch event with White Whale Bookstore.

Ordinary Hazards is about a woman named Emma who grew up in the wealthy world of Wall Street finance and now lives in a small, university-centric town in the Fingerlakes region of New York State. The book takes place over the course of one evening spent her beloved townie bar called The Final Final. We can tell early on that she’s recently lived through heartbreak and tragedy. With a lot of memory and flashback placed between the present-day scenes of community, tension, found family, and even violence, we as readers piece together the events that made her who she is right now.

This book became special to me for a few reasons. First, because I grew up in a small town adjacent to the one the story takes place in — all signs point definitively to it being Ithaca. Reading her describe everything from bar league softball to $3 beers on Wednesdays to the infamous red lights along that one main road (if you know it, you know) felt like sinking into home.

“In towns like ours, there’s a fine line between rustic and run-down. There are still a few cows in the fields. There are refurbished barns where kids from the U. have wedding receptions. There is a nearby swimming hole maintained as a state park. There’s a burger place where you can get your name on the wall and a free T-shirt for eating four burgers in under an hour. There’s also an opioid epidemic. And family farms in foreclosure. And historic houses so dilapidated even the frat bros won’t live in them. Our town is like a woman who looks good from fifty yards.”

The other reason this felt special is because Anna Bruno is … a lot like me. She got an MBA and managed PR and marketing for fintech companies in Silicon Valley (I have an MBA and write longform content for a fintech start-up), AND she got an MFA in fiction and wrote a novel (which I maybe might perhaps…do someday). Honestly, that just feels like a hopeful nudge from the universe, no?

But even beyond that, this book was so good. It’s infused with so much emotion, so many quotable passages about heartbreak and love and shared history and trauma and everything relatable. You turn and turn the pages, wrapped up wholly in the dual stories that you know will spin together as you approach the end. You root for her, against her, alongside her. You feel sad and hopeful and sad and hopeful again.

I will be treasuring this one for a long time.