You Never Get It Back by Cara Blue Adams

​I’m the first to rate and review this book on here. Oh, the responsibility, the responsibility…
Ok, so, let’s talk about it…
    There’s a very specific sort of literature out there, a finely crafted and composed works that practically scream of the years it took to produce them in many literary workshops and writers colonies. It shows everywhere from the meticulously arranged mise en scene to the precisely etched characters. And oftentimes the trees are so perfectly arranged that the forest gets forgotten. Which is to say the details are fine, but the grand picture is underwhelming.
    This novel is a really good example of that. It’s well written with tremendous attention to detail, but overall it doesn’t actually offer all that much outside of a strangely vague (for all the detail) portrait of a protagonist as a young woman. Well, young and youngish, it leaves off with her at 31 or so.
    The book is structured like a collection of short stories or vignettes, but it’s actually a proper novel with a proper protagonist. Kate. And her journey from a wintery small town in New England and life with a younger sister a depressed single mother to a scorchingly hot Arizona, a career and love affairs. It’s compelling enough of a journey to entice the reader, meaning the narrative itself works. There’s just this thing…after spending all that time with Kate, you don’t really get her as a person. She’s a vague, aloof, distant sort of a protagonist and she maintains that throughout. She’s reticent when it comes to romance, she’s nice enough but never striking in any way, she’s kind of a milquetoast of a person. Or maybe she’s just written that way.
    And her trajectory has a very women’s fiction thing to it. And so in the end the book does too. 
Overall, it’s a fine read and coming in under 200 pages it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it doesn’t quite grab the reader the way you’d want a book to. It just passes by, like scenes from life, faintly charming and then just faint. A very typical university press novel. Competently executed, eloquent, elegant even, but done in very muted tones with a lovely ending to lift it up.
     Might work differently for different readers. Who knows. But you know the thing about time is that you never get it back. Thanks Netgalley.