Cathy Rentzenbrink (2021) Everyone is Still Alive.

The cover describes Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Everyone is Still Alive as ‘A Total Triumph’. Ah, that rare beast? A fictional triumph?  Well, it almost failed my first 30 pages test-reading. It was OKish. A Magnolia Tree planted in Magnolia Road doesn’t quite have the same resonance as say A Tree in Harlem. Middle-class folk doing middle-class things. Ho-hum.

The other problem I had was I’d read her latest fictional work first. Ordinary Time tells the story a librarian who marries a vicar, but she’s not sure she loves him. She does her love her son, aged around five, totally and utterly.

Don’t ever use ‘ditto’.

Juliet the central character in Everyone is Still Alive has moved into her mum’s house in Magnolia Road. She’s grieving (a common theme in Rentzenbrink’s fiction and non-fiction) her mum’s death. She’s trying to make a life, a new life, with her husband, Liam. He’s a writer who is also a stay-at-home father taking care of their five-year-old son, Charlie, who she loves totally and utterly.

Julie wonders if Liam still loves her. She’s become invisible to him. Just another drudge. That’s the same plot as Ordinary Time.  

Rentzenbrink as an author and bibliophile, also had a writer, a minor character in her latest novel.

Here Liam gets to be a bit of a prat and part-time playboy with the neighbours, while using them as material for his latest work.

But he also teaches creative writing and other stuff. In other words, he’s successful without being successful and known.

That doesn’t happen in my world.

But this is fiction. Rentzenbrink is great at reeling in the reader with those outsiders that aren’t really outside, but she makes them every woman and man. Expect a shock. She knows how to write about grief and even grief for love lost. Read on.