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Real Life and Other Fictions

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

***"If you're fascinated by unexplained phenomena, hop in a beat-up Audi with the kooky and supersmart Cassie Klein and her dog Luna for a voyage of discovery involving a giant moth, a West Virginia bridge collapse and a hot cryptozoologist. The droll Ms. Coll strikes again!"—People Magazine***

Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren't lining up.

In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she's an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true. She stood by her once-doting husband when his meteorology career took a nosedive, and now she has learned that the man who became an internet meme has been cheating on her.

She's had enough. She scoops up a teething puppy and embarks on a road trip that's heavy on impulse and light on planning. She's not sure where she's going, but she knows she might as well start at the beginning. What really happened to her parents all those years ago?

In this comically surreal, warmhearted journey, she encounters people she never knew existed—chief among them, an enigmatic cryptozoologist, who helps her in the quest to discover her past. And along the way, she looks for answers regarding curious sightings of a creature known as the Mothman in the months before her parents died. As the line between real life and fiction blurs, Cassie finds herself grappling with the nature of stories, myths, and who gets to write the endings.

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    • Kirkus

      May 15, 2024
      A writing professor haunted by mysteries in her past--and by moths, bridges, unfinished student stories, and her husband's lover's nightguard--returns to the scene of her parents' deaths. This book, which centers on uncanny coincidences and a fatal bridge collapse, enters the world in the immediate wake of the collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, adding a poignant depth charge to the sophisticated dark comedy this author is known for. Coll, who successfully mined her career as a bookstore events planner in Bookish People (2022), now gives us Cassie Klein, an endearing woman who teaches fiction at a community college and finds herself losing sleep over the predicaments never resolved in student work: "Sometimes I wonder if I am anyone at all, or just a composite of the people I know and the stories I've read." But Cassie is also carrying around a few stories of her own: the very public mistakes of her Richard Gere-look-alike weatherman husband, whose relationship with their supposed family friend is revealed when the woman's dental apparatus shows up on Cassie's nightstand, and the enigma of her parents' deaths in a (real) 1967 West Virginia bridge collapse when she was just 2, the same one that inspired the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere as a weatherman. As the book opens, a few days before Christmas, Cassie is heading over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to spend the holiday Jewish style (i.e., eating Chinese food) with the aunt and uncle who raised her, the former a beloved NPR personality. A moth in her car causes some problems on the way, and then, as usual, her aunt and uncle won't answer a single question about what happened to her parents. But this time, Cassie tears out in her ancient Audi for West Virginia, where she will find everything she's looking for, and then some. Coll's deadpan narrative voice, once it hits you, is like when a stand-up comic finds your funny bone and you just can't stop laughing. And yet the laughter never fails to somehow encompass the obduracy of loss and other woes of this mortal coil. A kooky treasure, rooted in the deeply literary, slightly askew interior world that makes this author's work so fine.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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