Attention, readers – there is good news. Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich has written a sequel to her debut novel, Not Your Penance. The female protagonist we came to know in the earlier text has re-appeared in The Ruins. Enid’s life has broken into fragments due to a marriage breakup, the global pandemic, acerbic teenagers, a carelessly declawed cat, a husband in a midlife crisis dating younger women, a hook up, and global travels that take her back home to Alberta for healing medicine in the form of the vaccine and time with family members who remind Enid of the places where she is unbroken. Early in the novel, a frustrated Enid tells her shallow, flaccid yet successful husband that people "crave authenticity". As we accompany Enid through the ruins and wreckage, it becomes clear that she is finding a path towards her truth, even while the world breaks down around her. While Enid sometimes finds herself in a maze, getting lost, we ultimately realize she is in a labyrinth, bringing her troubles in and leaving them on the way out. As a courageous hero, Enid fearlessly wanders on and marks uncharted paths, using the rubble as the foundation for her journey.

- Josephine L. Savarese, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, St. Thomas University

While the author’s first novel, Not Your Penance, sought peace out of chaos, here Rebecca Bromwich brings us a novel where her characters choose movement, even while rooted in place by the forced stillness of a pandemic. Enid, the titular character, journeys against guidance and toward herself, exposing the depth of the emotional ruins of her life. This is a tale of divorce, of mothering through disruption, and especially of deepening self-awareness. It is also a tale of life, fraught with messiness and constant construction, but with the hope of a vaccine and love.

-Dr. Michelle Hughes Miller, Associate Professor in the USF Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of South Florida