When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: Any lingering Brat Pack associations you may bring to When It Happens to You, Molly Ringwald’s first novel, will rapidly evaporate. Ringwald renders the families and lovers in her intertwined stories with a compassionate eye for the kind of heartbreak that upends reality, as well as a keen sense of the more subtle ways in which trust breaks and mends. Each of her eight stories explores the dynamics of fidelity and betrayal, from “The Harvest Moon”--which illuminates the night a mother realizes the fickle nature of her daughter, her husband, and her own body--to “Mea Culpa,” where we see the erosion of her husband’s desire, to the gut punch of a title story. --Mari Malcolm