The entirety of Ordinary Hazards takes place in one evening at a local bar, "the kind of bar that doesn't exist in cities, a peculiarity of a small town that has seen better days." The lone woman in a ragtag bunch of locals there, Emma banters with the other regulars and dodges texts from her concerned friends, perched on a stool as two versions of herself: "the woman I am and the woman I used to be." As she vacillates between these women within herself, she recalls the career, the marriage, the friends, the son and the ambition that brought her to this precise moment in this bar in this town: 5 p.m. at The Final Final in upstate New York.
From the outset, it is clear that something about this situation is very wrong. That 5 p.m. moment is rife with tension, though it takes the completion of Anna Bruno's perfectly paced debut novel to understand why. Over the course of the next eight hours, through Emma's recollections and her interactions with the rest of the crew at The Final Final, it becomes clear that everything that brought Emma to this moment is now gone. The unnamed feeling bubbling beneath the surface of Emma's night of drinking is grief, and everything that accompanies it: blame, guilt, shame, sadness, anger, despair and a prevailing sense of "if only." Ordinary Hazards is a kaleidoscopic novel of the best variety, spinning into and out of itself as it explores grief, love and loss in ways that will haunt readers long past the last page. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer