Lindsay Starck’s debut novel is a loose retelling of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. The main points carried over into Noah’s Wife is that there is man named Noah whose purpose is to save, and there are animals, so if you aren’t terribly familiar with the Biblical story, you still know enough!

Excerpt of my review:

You learn each character so well that before you know it, you have the backstory and future dreams of many people, causing you to feel like you're part of the town and these are your neighbors....

Getting to know a bunch of characters isn't enough, though; there has to be a deeper message in a novel, especially one that is almost 400 pages. A few messages I got from Lindsay Starck's book is that love is an abstract concept, and people's definitions vary much more than I had personally thought. To Mrs. McGinn, love, like beauty, is not painless. For Dr. Yu, Noah's wife's best friend, love means that the ones we love never find mates that we feel are good enough for them. For Leesl, love means not being with the one she loves and instead yearning. For Mrs. McGinn's daughter, who has witnessed her mother's many divorces, love means monogamy, and she tells her fiance (the zookeeper) to list off the animals that mate for life in what almost sounds like verbal foreplay.

Full review at Grab the Lapels!