I give this book 4 stars because it is a book with good writing, a normal plot, realistic characters (so normal!), a satisfying but not tidy ending, and because there is no sensational twists, sappy love story, ridiculous action, explicit sex, stress or otherwise difficult reading. it is what I wish more books were: a good story about regular life. ( )

The Opening Sky doesn't reveal much, if anything.

If the sky opens in author Joan Thomas's novel, The Opening Sky, it doesn't reveal much. This could be a story about your neighbours and is about as interesting.

Aiden and Liz are a career oriented, upper middle class couple with a daughter, Sylvie, in college. Liz is the director of the non-profit Sexuality Education Resource Centre and Aiden is a therapist.

Their comfortable lives begin to unravel, not a lot mind you, when their daughter becomes pregnant.

This unwanted pregnancy is what drives the novel, though with such a tepid conflict suffice to say it never really gets out of first gear.

While many novels take ordinary people in less than good circumstances and have them step up and do heroic deeds, Thomas's characters do just the opposite, despite ideal circumstances and training they come up short.

Liz seems to define herself by her good taste in decorating, clothes, gourmet cooking, living in the right neighbourhood and holidaying in the trendy destinations. It takes all her time, energy and focus - which is why she does it.

Aiden is one of those people who espouse liberal ideals but does not have the guts to follow through. He subsequently feels powerless and impotent though it's by his own doing - or not doing.

Sylvie is an only child, naive and unrealistic in her cocoon of entitlement, who is constantly proselytizing about how people should make sacrifices to save the planet while having yet to experience life other than attending college and living in a dorm, both funded by her parents.

All the characters in this novel are not only unsympathetic, but insipid. Though at times the plot smolders, it never bursts into flames.

The only redeeming quality in this novel is Thomas's exceptional writing. Unfortunately, whereas a good story can overcome bad writing, the opposite is never true. ( )

Story centered primarily on how two mothers try to influence their children when the 19 year-old daughter discovers she is five months pregnant. Aiden and Liz are the parents of Sylvie, who is a university student focused on environmental issues. Aiden is a psychotherapist and Liz is ironically head of a reproduction choice and Planned Parenthood centre. Noah, Sylvie’s boyfriend is a promising biologist whose mother, Mary Magdalene, (Maggie) was a close friend of Liz’s when the two children were toddlers. Maggie advocates for adoption, while Liz advocates for keeping the baby. Sylvie and Noah are undecided, and Noah is extremely disinterested in the father role. When Sylvie visits Noah at his research facility and accidently leaves the baby in the car while she goes to bury a diaper, the fate of the baby is taken over by childcare advocates. Interesting take on an age-old dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy. Character development is well done, but the story lags in places. ( )

After having dilly-dallied with a Ph.D. in English Literature for a significant part of his adult life, Aidan Phimester trained as a psychotherapist. For years, his common-law wife, Liz, a planned-parenthood coordinator, has been the chief bread-winner and decision maker in the home,inwardly resenting this role. Their already troubled common-law marriage--characterized as it is by deep ambivalence--is only to become further complicated when the couple receives startling news from their nineteen-year-old daughter.

Sylvie, a university student committed to the environmental movement, floats about rather absently in her own world. While committed to the earth, she is deeply out of touch with her own body, apparently not remarking that she hasn't had a menstrual period in months and only realizing that she's pregnant when the student-health-center physician confirms it. Sylvie's long-distance boyfriend, Noah, is also studying environmental science--in faraway Guelph. He and Sylvie have known each other since early childhood when their mothers were involved in a hippy-ish alternative parenting group. Their friendship had been fractured then, when Noah had a serious injury while in Liz's care. However, the young people reconnected in the summer before the story opens.

With the prospect of the coming child, the two families are forced into a tension-fraught "reunion" of sorts. Liz, a brittle, "competent" woman, more interested in Martha-Stewart-like home decorating and cooking projects than emotional connection is forced to revisit her intense rivalry with Noah's self-righteously maternal mother, Maggie (still thought of by Liz as "Mary Magdalene"--her telling former name). Liz experiences strain from another direction as well. Years ago she and daughter Sylvie were involved in an incident marked by infidelity and the death of a child. After the traumatic event, a disillusioned pre-teen Sylvie began to address Liz by first name, plainly rejecting her as a mother.

A good part of The Opening Sky revolves around the two (grand)mothers--Liz and Maggie/Mary Magdalene--reigniting their rivalry--this time, around the fate of their unnamed grandchild, about whom Sylvie and Noah are plainly intensely ambivalent. There is a resolution to this problem, but it, like so much of this book, it is implied rather than clearly stated. It seems that Thomas's entire modus operandi is to "tell the truth but tell it slant." Indeed, throughout the book the reader is confronted with one puzzling scene or conversation after another. It is often difficult to figure out where these people stand in relation to each other. Their relationships and conversations have all the messiness and frustration of real life.

In some ways, The Opening Sky put me in mind of the fiction of American writer Sue Miller who also writes character-driven domestic fiction that seeks to explore the labyrinthine chambers of the human heart and the unspoken subtexts of family life. Joan Thomas's characters are complex, but not likeable. Are they interesting? I'm not sure. The novel's beautiful, often lyrically written pages as well as its environmental themes lift it above mere domestic or "women's" fiction. Minus these characteristics, it could so easily have been a soap opera. Having said that, in spite of the novel's artistic merits--its skillful language and its carefully shifting of point of view (which reveals the internal workings of the minds of Aidan, Sylvie, and, to some extent, Liz)--the book left me cold. There is a detached chilly quality to the novel. As a result, I only cautiously recommend it, urging patience and flexibility in readers who do attempt the book.

Rating 3/5
Thank you to the Goodreads Giveaway program and the author for providing me with a copy of this book for review. ( )