J. Robert Lennon's slim novel Familiar contains parallel worlds, two corresponding sets of characters and an incisive depiction of its protagonist's psychology as she navigates a life that is unrecognizable, but strangely... familiar. It begins when an crack in Elisa's windshield vanishes; suddenly, she's driving a new car, wearing strange clothes, and her body is 15 pounds heavier. She finds her way home, but now her failed marriage seems to be intact again--and her son Silas, who died eight years ago, is full-grown and alive.
This isn't the fantastical reprieve it seems, though. Elisa's relationship with her husband is governed by bizarre rules imposed on them by a therapist, including a deliberate estrangement from their two grown sons. When she seeks them out anyway, she finds that Silas has grown into the twisted person she feared he would--and the son who survived and thrived in the world she knows is far worse off in this one.
"She will live in hell if she has to," Elisa thinks, obsessed with finding an explanation, "if only somebody will tell her that yes, it's hell, and she does not belong here." But time passes, the two worlds blur, and whether Elisa is crazy or the victim of a freak cosmic event is beside the point: this is not a crisis of reality, but one of identity.
Lennon's smart, chilling prose and the urgency of present tense carry this story to its dramatic, if ambiguous, conclusion. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice