The Whole World Over by Julia Glass

I enjoyed this book. The main character is Greenie, wife of Alan, mother of George. They live in a small apartment in New York. Greenie started her own business as a baker, and Alan is a psychoanalyst. George is 4 years old.

Greenie gets a call from the assistant to New Mexico's governor who has tasted her coconut cake and fallen in love with it. He asks her to come to New Mexico and be his chef. She decides to do it, as a kind of adventure. She takes George and goes out to New Mexico. Alan stays in New York. Greenie ends up loving New Mexico and encourages Alan to join them so he begins to "wean" his patients (which are very few anyway) and prepares to move.

But that move doesn't happen. Greenie meets an old boyfriend and falls in love with him. She decides to separate from Alan. Some things happen that end up with Alan taking George back to New York with him. Then September 11 happens and everything changes again.

It sounds kind of shallow as I describe it, and I was kind of disgusted with Greenie for leaving Alan. But she still was a likeable character. There are a lot of other characters, too. The governor, his assistant, the restaurant owner next door, the bookstore owner across the street, a woman named Saga who has brain damage from an accident, memories of Greenie's mother. Somehow it all works. I liked the characters and the writing. It was a good story that kept me turning the pages. I enjoyed being in New York and New Mexico, especially New Mexico. I thought it was a good presentation of what marriage can feel like, too.

It was interesting to read a novel with September 11 as an event within it. That's a first for me. The author described one of the characters in New York looking out her window and seeing paper falling like snow. I suppose that happened. I had not thought of it, although I saw the photos of all the debris at the towers and on the people there at the scene. It sounds like paper fell in a similar way to ashes falling when a volcano happens.

I recommend this book, and I think I'll try another book by Julia Glass. The book references "the National Book Award-Winning" Three Junes. That sounds familiar; I'm not sure if I've read it or not.