One Day I Shall Astonish the World

March 1, 2022

Stibbe (Reasons To Be Cheerful) chronicles the 30-year friendship between Susan and Norma. Divided into three parts--friendship, work, and marriage--the story of their connection ebbs and flows in direct correlation to the success of their personal lives. When Susan aims to better herself or her career, Norma can be counted on to discourage her. When Norma disappears for regular intervals, traveling or falling in love with someone new, Susan steps up to cover her responsibilities. Throughout the decades of conversations about men, children, and sex, the division of power in their relationship remains uneven. It is Susan who begins to realize, as she matures, that she may never have really known Norma at all. When tensions convene at the women's main battleground, the college where they both work (whose motto is the same as the book's title), it is Susan's tenacity and humor that ultimately win the day, changing their dynamic once again. VERDICT Stibbe skillfully captures the humor that comes with everyday defeat, and the friendship of Susan and Norma will ring true for many women.--Tina Panik

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2022
Susan Faye Warren--wife, mother, worker, and friend--shares the events of her adult life, interspersed with much deadpan detail, in Stibbe's latest comic/domestic dispatch. With her singular voice and deep roots in the English psyche, Stibbe has carved out a niche for oddball female narrators set against quirky provincial settings. Her fourth novel follows this pattern, tracing Susan's interior and exterior landscapes as she traverses three decades of marriage to Roy, her parenting of their daughter, Honey, and accounts of an on/off friendship with the unpredictable Norma. The setting is England's smallest county, Rutland, specifically the town of Brankham, where Roy and Susan meet while she's studying English at the University of Rutland while holding down a Saturday job at the Pin Cushion, a haberdashery owned by the Pavlous, Norma's parents. But over the years, the marriage devolves into something "that neither Roy or I seem to care about one jot," while Honey grows into an unusual child, although devoted and loyal to Grace, the surprise sister Roy turns out to have fathered with his landlady before meeting Susan. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on in the community, some of them sexual, and Norma becomes increasingly less reliable as she achieves enviable-seeming successes, professionally and personally. When Norma takes as her second husband the university's vice chancellor, for whom Susan works, the women's friendship becomes thornier still, as Norma blocks Susan's plans and steals her ideas. But is all what it seems? Stibbe's new novel, with its long time span and variable, sometimes chilly relationships, offers a cooler vision than some of her earlier works, but the trademark tone, humor, nostalgic detail, and skewed perspective remain as reliably diverting as ever. Emotional upsets and surprises are interleaved with eccentricity in this latest slice of offbeat Englishness.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
When English university student Susan first hears of Norma Pavlou, it's as the brilliant daughter of the owner of the Pin Cushion, the sewing shop where Susan works summers and weekends. Though Susan and Norma are close in age, good old Mrs. Pavlou doesn't think they'll be friends, the subtext being that Susan is far too ordinary. This throwaway phrase sets up everything, in a way, in Stibbe's (Reasons to Be Cheerful, 2019) darling fourth novel in which the two women, of course, become lifelong best friends and sometimes best rivals. Susan is a narrator in the Stibbean tradition; upbeat, charming, slightly nervous, funny both intentionally and not, and, most of all, accommodating to life's sharp turns, such as when she becomes pregnant and drops out to get married and have baby Honey. Decades pass. Her husband changes and Honey grows up. Norma shocks Susan, irritates her, and lets her down, but also shows up when it counts. We assume this goes both ways and start to understand that some people in Susan's life tire of her constant chatter, which is a shame, because readers absolutely do not. An anything-but-average tale of a thrillingly ordinary friendship, which is to say one that's strengthening, humiliating, confounding, and cheering, depending on the day.

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