Booklist
About The Space Between Before and After
May 2008

In her third character-driven novel, Page delves into the entangled lives of three generations of one slightly dysfunctional family, creating a story full of decades-old resentments, tentative reconciliations, and, ultimately, an optimistic future. Holli Templeton, now living in Manhattan, was raised in Texas by her grandmother Raine after her young mother died, and her father and his second wife and their daughter "made a new family, then forgot to issue [her] a membership card." Now divorced, Holli leads a solitary life, more so since her son Conner dropped out of Brown in his sophomore year and hurriedly moved to Texas with his girlfriend, Kilian. Suddenly Holli and Harrison, Conner's father, are summoned there--to assess both Raine's possible dementia and her ability to continue living alone and Conner and Kilian's mysterious crisis. It seems the simultaneously "fierce and fragile" Kilian has cystic fibrosis, something Conner neglected to tell them, and she is pregnant. Page portrays these past and present emotional quagmires with an acutely intuitive eye, drawing the reader into the complicated lives of her sympathetic characters.--Deborah Donovan