A poignant tale with interesting allegory between the character's failing marriage and her new-found interest in "Urban Exploring".

With her marriage crumbling, Evangeline (also known as Eva or Evie) has high hopes that her relationship can be saved through couples counseling with her husband of six years, Mark. Eva is also bored with her job as a wedding and baby photographer and is looking for something new. With conversations with Matt being so tense, Eva leaves him out of the loop as she dives into a new type of photography that she hopes will reinvigorate her career - Urban Exploration, or UrbEx - visiting abandoned buildings and documenting the decay in a not-so-legal hobby that amps up the excitement.

The novel touches on many themes that are common in modern life - career, relationships, family, what truly makes us happy. You'll cheer for Evie to find her way through as the story winds to its conclusion (which I won't label so as not to spoil it.)

Well worth the read for fans of contemporary fiction and women's stories. ( )

Emotional. Thoughtful. Poignant.

Eva (Evangeline) is a twenty eight year old woman, a photographer, who is fascinated with old and crumbling things. Eva becomes part of a group of “urban explorers” who visit derelict and abandoned buildings - each of them looking for beauty and yearning for a connection to some lost part of themselves.

“Time was not an unlimited resource. Time passed. Time slipped away. Nothing was immune.”

In Eva’s case, her six-year marriage has become a battleground; her relationship with Mark, her husband, reduced to separate bedrooms and a growing awareness of the loneliness of lost intimacy and the desolation of what feels to Eva like emotional abandonment. Desperate to reclaim what she fears may now be lost forever between them, Eva’s journeys into decaying buildings become a sort of subconscious metaphorical life-line, a feverish attempt to find a structure, a beauty, a robust foundation, an architectural footing - anything that can that prove that rebuilding (her marriage, and perhaps more importantly, herself) however difficult, is an option worth pursuing.

“She was learning how much beauty there can be in broken things, but the broken things were also helping her to repair something within her(self).”

Eva’s desperation and the lengths she will go to in her blindly self-obliterating quest for the preservation of her marriage are brutally sad - it’s heartbreakingly recognizable as a pattern so many vulnerable women may fall into. We ache for Eva and at the same time, identify with her fragility and self-denial and so wish she could buttress herself into a stronger emotional place.

My kudos to the author - this is a thoughtful and haunting book which handles a difficult subject with great skill and compassion.

A great big thank you to the author, who provided me with a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts presented are my own. ( )