A Window Opens - Elisabeth Egan

Many thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read this and provide my honest review.
Release Date: August 25, 2015

Rating: 4 stars

I completed A Window Opens in four hours, because this is a book for people who love books and I am definitely one of those.

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Alice Pearse has an idyllic life, she works part time as a book reviewer for a magazine, has a husband with a great job at a law firm, three children she can dote upon, and time for all the extracurricular in between, like spin class and PTA. One day though, her husband announces he wasn't going to be making it to partner and oh, he quit to start his own firm. Alice puts some feelers out, hoping to ease their financial strains, and lands herself with a dream job at Scroll. Scroll is a brand new start up that aims to change the bookstore content and Alice is the leading employee for connecting publishers to Scroll. Life keeps moving though and Alice finds herself torn between the demands of a job, with an ever changing concept, and her family life. Her husbands detached, her children feeling neglected, and her father needs her support. As the book moves through the seasons, Alice finds herself torn between the true difficulty of balancing a career and the full-time demands of being a mother, wife, friend, and daughter.

I adored this book and immediately suggested to a few friends of mine that they pick it up when it hits shelves. Elisabeth Egan successfully weaves a story of the challenges of being a mother in the corporate world. She writes with a true love for books and knowledge of the industry that I feel really lent to this book. I really liked the characters, even when they were in the pitfalls of real life struggles, and Egan's method of flashbacks made this novel that much more relatable. She doesn't shy away from the struggles of sick parents, friendship battles, or sugarcoat how hard Alice and her husband worked to get to where they were. The concept of landing one's dream job, only to find that it is not all that it seems, is all too common in my life and my friend's. Egan approached this wonderfully, with Alice learning herself while watching Scroll change right in front of her. A Window Opens is truly a realistic journey and as Alice finds her way home and back into the arms of her family I was really inspired by how real and ordinary the story really was.

The novel's various methods of dialog did throw me off at first, this isn't my normal preference, but the text messages and e-mails grew on me. They actually helped build the character more than I expected, especially Alice's manager who successfully played the role of friend and judgmental boss.

A Window Opens isn't a novel with a new concept, but I think it is a fresh take on an old concept. The dilemma for women in the corporate world and balancing family life is approached in a new way and Egan really did a fantastic job of blending several real life situations into the plot. I adored this book and I am really looking forward to hearing my friend's thoughts as well.