In Life #6 by Diana Wagman (Spontaneous; The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets), a middle-aged woman replays her past as she confronts her own mortality after a recent cancer diagnosis. Fiona is almost 50 years old and a part-time tour guide at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., stuck in a struggling marriage with an out-of-work, bitter journalist. She decides to contact her ex-boyfriend Luc and arrange a rendezvous with him in Newport, R.I., the site of their tumultuous and near fatal nautical adventure 30 years ago. Along the way, she ponders her five close brushes with death--a drug overdose, rape, nearly being run over by a car while playing in a pile of leaves, breaking through the windshield of a car, a beating by her mother's boyfriend--and the life she would have lived if not for the heartbreak of Luc's heroin addiction. The 19-year-old Fiona molded Luc into a Greek myth, and it is the older Fiona who must contend with the reality her mythmaking has created in defining the next stage of her life. "We suffer personal deaths, little bits of ourselves that pass away," writes Wagman. "The seas get rough and the tides turn."
Wagman alternates between first-person present and third-person past tenses in retelling Fiona's story, contrasting regret against youthful naiveté, wistfulness and longing against fear of the unknown. Her references to Greek mythology, particularly Odysseus' ill-fated travels, and Hero and Leander's tragic love interrupted, are woven cleverly into the narrative to coincide with Fiona's emotional turmoil, elevating Life #6 well beyond mere beach read. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant