![]() ![]() She observes everything in the minutest detail, especially as it concerns her body. She has vivid dreams of drowning that make the pages feel waterlogged. Her interior life, however, is one dark, lively neighborhood. Not much happens in “Rest and Be Thankful”: Laura shows up for work, looks in on her patients, interacts with her colleagues, goes home, sleeps and dreams, gets up, does it again. Glass, herself a pediatric nurse who earned critical acclaim for her debut novel “Peach,” expertly mixes long, loping sentences with short declarations and fragments. ![]() Here she is unfurling some fresh sheets: “As we lift them taut into the air I hope to smell the fake flowery fragrance or fresh-washed sheets but all I smell is dry sterility, the faint smell of steel, steam and slight scorching.” Scintillating. Laura may be inundated by gloom, but her gloom really zings. Laura’s mind overflows with the language of her creator, Emma Glass, which means she floats along on a sea of high-wire alliteration, jazzy rhythms and tactile description. Everyday life is coming down hard on her head, and she’s scrambling to keep up. Her boyfriend, good for very little, plans to leave her. The constant specter of infant mortality besieges her every thought at the frenzied London hospital where she works. She keeps hallucinating a dark figure intent on self-destruction. Laura, the haunted heroine of the haunting dynamo novel “Rest and Be Thankful,” is a pediatric nurse spiraling into a nasty case of burnout. ![]()
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