Waiting for Liz by Angela C. Kelly

Three out of Five Stars

Summary

Angela is twenty-nine and living what looks like a comfortable life in a Midwestern college town: she has a home with her adoring long-time partner, a circle of good friends, a recently acquired degree, and a job that uses it. But everything isn’t as lovely as it looks.

Slowly a soul-level unravelling is occurring within Angela, without her knowledge or consent. Each destructive self-sabotaging choice brings her closer to the kind of destruction that ultimately makes room for new growth in a person’s heart.

Enter Elizabeth. Though Angela claims to have paid little attention when they are first introduced, Elizabeth — Liz — eventually consumes her every thought, much like the drugs she and her wife have begun to use to mask the growing rift in their relationship. When Angela decides to call her partner’s bluff and invite this new “hot young plaything” to help them patch things up, a decades-long story of pursuit, addiction, love, and growth begins.

Angela’s story winds through her past, each tale about her relationship with Liz opening up a window to times even farther past that have shaped how she connects with other people, especially those she loves. Woven through it all are threads of addiction, abandonment, shame, perseverance, joy, and love. Has she come to terms with her past? With Elizabeth herself?

The Review

Angela seems to have it all. A comfortable life with her partner and great friends. Her life has become a comfortable routine. It’s easy. She hangs on to all these things, even though her happiness has been dwindling.

In a self-destructive attempt to address the issues between Angela and her partner, they begin to experiment with drugs. Angela also finds herself enraptured with Liz. Everything she does starts to revolve around Liz and the possibility of what if?

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I felt so many negative emotions while reading. Sadness, anger, frustration with what Angela was experiencing. And then on the other, we were given such a hard dose of reality as we followed Angela’s life.

If you have difficultly reading about drug use, this is going to be a tough one for you to read. I’ve got a bit of complicated relationship with addiction, so it was difficult to read. But, there are people who go towards drugs in the hopes that it will strengthen a relationship. The reliance that Angela developed hurt my heart.

As Angela poorly navigated so many different relationships, she steadily began to find herself and understand who she was and is as an individual. It an experience of personal growth that takes years.

Her careless and selfish nature made me so angry, but at the same time I could see she was doing whatever she could to hold on to life as she knew it to be.

Reading this? It felt like a sucker punch.

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