Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline

Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline was entirely fascinating for me.  It is not a thriller sort of book, although it does begin with a tragic accident.  It is a quiet study of how two marriages and four friends peel apart, never to be the same again.

Alison and Charlie are married with two small children.  They met while Charlie was at Oxford and Alison was visiting her childhood friend, Claire and her fiance, Ben.  Claire and Ben, Alison and Charlie, two couples who have shared a very close friendship for over a decade.  It is true that things have changed between them.  One couple has moved with their young family to the suburbs.  Alison spends her days busy with her children and their activities, waiting for Charlie to get home from his job in the city.  Ben and Claire have an equally busy life, Claire with her career as a new novelist, and Ben, an architect and designer of some note.  However, two of the group have a secret.  Claire and Charlie have been having an affair, and they are not about to let each other go.  

On the evening the story begins, everything these friends believe about each other changes in an instant when Alison is involved in an accident on her way home from the launch party for Claire's new book.  It's dark and raining, the other car runs a stop sign, and Alison's blood alcohol level is just barely over the limit.  However, this one event sets in motion a cascade of small changes that eventually reveal the many cracks in the bonds that hold Alison and Claire and Charlie and Ben together.  It begins:

For Alison, these things will always be connected:  the moment that cleaved her life into two sections and the dawning realization that even before the accident her life was not what it seemed.  In the instant it took the accident to happen, and in the slow-motion moments afterward, she still believed that there was order in the universe--that she'd be able to put things right.  But with one random error, built on dozens of tiny mistakes of judgment, she stepped into a different story that seemed, for a long time, to have nothing to do with her.  She watched as if behind one-way glass, as the only life she recognized slipped from her grasp.

This is the first book that I've read by the author, Christina Baker Kline.  It will not be the last.  The narrative is presented in some rather interesting ways.  The story is told from the viewpoints of all four major characters, rotating among Alison, Charlie, Ben and Claire.  Interspersed between are short scenes, moving backwards chronologically in time and showing how they all met and became friends.  I really liked this plot device and it worked very well for me.  Each time we cut away from the present moment, another layer was stripped from the characters who, in the end, were laid bare with nothing hidden and their secret motivations revealed.  It was really effective, in my opinion.  This was not a cheerful story, but it was a compelling one.

I'll share a couple of other quotes to show more of the character of Alison:

It wasn't that Alison wanted to be Claire--she didn't.  But she admired her tenacity and clarity and single-mindedness, particularly compared with her own indecisiveness.  Alison had been living for other people for so long that she could barely identify what she wanted for herself anymore.  She'd find herself paralyzed with indecision in the strangest places--the grocery store, for instance, where she roamed the aisles with a rising panic, even as she clutched a list in her hand: What would her kids eat?  What would her husband want?  She rarely asked herself what she wanted.  It seemed irrelevant. 

After the accident, in which Alison is deemed not at fault, except in her own mind:

Alison felt alone in a way that she couldn't ever remember having felt, a sense of aloneness so profound that she couldn't breathe.  I have done this, she thought--I deserve this.  I deserve to feel this way. 

And, finally, a phrase to sum up the book in its entirety:

...life hinges on small moments and seemingly trivial decisions.   

I was very pleased to be part of the tour for Bird in Hand, presented by TLC Book Tours.  Thank you to the ladies there and the publisher, Harper Collins, for sending me a copy of this book.

Please take a look at the other stops on the tour here.

You can connect with Christina Baker Kline on her website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @bakerkline.