Review of When We Lost Touch

[abstactlemon]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "When We Lost Touch" by Susan Kraus.]

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4 out of 5 stars

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When We Lost Touch by Susan Kraus is a novel that is set in the heat of the pandemic and delves into the different lives of the people experiencing it. The novel follows a diverse cast of characters, including Grace, a therapist who returns from a cruise just as the virus emerges. There is also Katrina, her best friend, who is dealing with a long-term case of COVID. Friendships form over Zoom calls, long-distance relationships become strained, people grieve the loss of loved ones to the virus, and doctors wrestle with the ethics of keeping suffering patients alive. Kraus took a magnifying glass to the pandemic and asked herself what stories could be told.

I have to start by saying that plot threads are plentiful in this book. It is multiple stories in one, yet Kraus still manages to write a very cohesive book. She refers to her work as “contemporary historical fiction,” and I think that is a very apt description. It combines elements of literary fiction with the historical event that is the pandemic and weaves an amazing story from those two sources.

The character work in this book was fantastic. There were dozens of named characters, which is always something I’m apprehensive about. Because of its nature, by the time you’ve discovered the problem, you are most likely in the thick of the book. However, Kraus handles all her characters flawlessly. No matter how little page time they got, most of them were engaging, complex, consistent, and diverse from the rest of the cast. Despite doing all that, the story never overwhelmed you.

This book wasn’t just about the pandemic; it also touched on other events that happened during that time. It delves into some political topics and talks about race with regard to the George Floyd incident. I thought it handled that particular topic very well. While it’s inevitable that some people will raise the point that, as a white woman, it isn’t Kraus’s story to tell, there are multiple sides to race, and she clearly did her research for an accurate portrayal of the side that she was unfamiliar with.

I did have some problems, however. The book provides “historical context” at the end of each chapter, which is essentially a list of every noteworthy thing that happened that month during the pandemic. I understood that its purpose was to ground readers in the book, but it felt like a wall of text that I had to climb to get to the story on the other side. Also, I loved the dialogue in the book; it was honestly one of my favorite things about it, but some other parts of the prose were a bit inconsistent. That being said, this gets 4 out of 5 stars.

I would recommend this novel to lovers of literary fiction. However, here is my obligatory disclaimer for every decent pandemic novel: the book excels at capturing what it felt like during the pandemic and the situations we had to deal with during that time. For sensitive readers, if you pick this up, you might relive some of those bad memories. If you are fine with that, then this is a fantastic read.

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When We Lost Touch
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