So Many Beats of the Heart is the second novel by Australian journalist and author, Carrie Cox. Less than a year after moving across the country for her husband’s new job, Evie Shine is blindsided when Hamish walks out, with no more explanation than “I just need some time”. Evie gave up work she enjoyed as a marriage counsellor in Cottesloe, and is now lecturing in psychology at the Sunshine Coast University to make ends meet.

Five thousand kilometres from friends and family, her daughter Shera attending a Perth University, Evie seems to be in stasis, hiding from the world. She knows she needs to “do something about this test pattern of an existence” but lacks motivation. She is left to see her son through his final year of school without any input from his father, worried and angry about the effect this abandonment is having on him.

She supposes she could uproot Angus from the first school that he rates as no worse than “boring”, and return to Perth, but that would mean explaining, many times over, what happened with her husband of twenty years. Which she doesn’t understand herself. And who wants to air their marriage problems in public, especially given her previous job? How could she have missed the signs? Were there signs?

And returning to the scene of what she believed was a happy life? “…she knows it’s irrational to fear a place that mostly holds good memories. But that’s the illogical thing: when good memories become too painful to look at, they’re tainted somehow and so is where they happened.”

Le Cose Semplici, the Italian coffee place at the end of her street is a refuge: she can hide at a table at the back. But there’s no hiding from the irrepressible Ronni, larger than life and with an interrogation technique worthy of the CIA. Not only guaranteed entertainment, she is also a sharp observer of human behaviour, and soon becomes a friend, sounding board and supporter.

At the dreaded Bunnings, her usual feelings of intimidation are alleviated by a friendly guy in a wheelchair, James, who also turns out to be good company and a font of sound advice about single parenting that includes: “As long as there’s love, it doesn’t matter how many people are managing its distribution.”

Then a milestone family birthday looms. Will time and new friends in this altered life give Evie the courage to face a return visit to Perth and all it holds?

The main narrative is interspersed with vignettes of Evie’s counselling couples that demonstrate the role that relationship counselling can plays and just why midlife often reveals hidden relationship problems. And just like the shoemaker’s barefoot children, a marriage counsellor may fail to see the cracks in her own relationship. Experts are human, but Evie’s counsellor self still tries to fathom what might have happened inside Hamish’s head when he arrived in Queensland.

Evie’s observations on midlife are so perceptive than many readers, especially those of a certain vintage, will find themselves chuckling, nodding their heads and exclaiming in agreement. “Do old photos make the present look like a lie, or is it the other way around?”

She comments on the pitfalls of midlife dating, where everyone has emotional baggage, and when Ronni tries to get her to at least set up an internet dating profile, her response is succinct: “Evie Shine. Forty-nine. Still buffering.” But ageing has some advantages: “embarrassment has a much shorter spin cycle that it used to.”

Cox has a wonderful way with words – Evie is a “blindsided spouse stuck in a loop of self-pity, anger and leaky moments in the supermarket.” Ronni’s family: “the lawless whirlwind of a functioning family in motion. The rhythm, or lack of it, that gets every last member through this thing once again – the taunts, the cries, the demands, the accusations. Love in all its forms” and her marriage “There was something about the scaffolding they’d erected around themselves that seemed strong enough to outlast the children within it.”

In her second novel, Cox gives the reader relatable characters in a tale that is insightful, moving, hopeful and, especially whenever Ronni is on the page, laugh-out-loud funny.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Affirm Press.