Book Review
Kristin Bair Alcove Press 2025
This is a book about a woman in her forties who experiences her first hot flash and is radicalized by it. Rather than continue stuffing all of the appointments and responsibilities for her three children and husband into her bursting chest cavity, she goes on strike.
It’s an arresting book. Here is a woman who has given herself entirely to her family, friends and job, but when she overhears her teenage daughter’s friends reading Bartleby the Scrivener she takes on his phrase ‘I prefer not to.’
While her family are left aghast, and struggling with the simplest of tasks (ordering take out seems a bridge too far), Clementine finds an eager audience among other women around her age. She becomes a master at spotting a hot flash and almost stages a riot in her ob-gyn’s office after he dismisses her symptoms and distress.
Clementine Crane is overwhelmed, sympathetic and a bit odd. She is unapologetic, which is initially very hard for her, and her grief and pain are clear. Should she give in to her family’s expectations and live a life of submission or should she remain true to the person she is becoming, forged in hot flashes and insomnia?
As in Bair’s other books, there’s a healthy dose of magical realism in this story, with snow continuously falling aided by spoons under pillows, a mysterious nighttime creature, and immediate viral success. The book is funny and smart, filled with memorable characters and green sweaters.
Yet Clementine’s story feels very real. She’s struggling to cope in a world which tells her that it’s up to her to keep all the balls in the air. It’s only after she lets the balls go that she discovers the time and space to become fully herself, complete and independent.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, I laughed, I cried and I tried to ignore the ways in which our lives were similar. I recommend it for any woman over 35 and any man who knows a woman over that age too.
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