A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do: A Novel
A young father must raise his newborn daughter alone and while grieving his wife who died in childbirth.
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My Review
Taz and Marnie are just starting their lives together, working on their fixer-upper in Montana and anticipating the birth of their first child. When Marnie dies in childbirth, Taz is consumed by grief–and left to raise his newborn daughter without her mother. Taz struggles to navigate a world he no longer recognizes, controlled by the needs of the baby, floating through a fog of exhaustion, love, and hopelessness.
A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do follows Taz’s first two years with his daughter, supported by a small cast of characters who support, push, back away, and push again in a uniquely stoic, Montana way.
Fromm’s writing is emotionally resonant; expansive when it needs to be, but sometimes staccato and sharp. Reading it feels like grieving, while fighting debilitating exhaustion. This small story brought me to tears more than once–something that doesn’t happen often. This is a “gut-punch,” five-star book; I haven’t heard much buzz about it, but I hope other readers will discover it and love it as much as I did.
Publisher’s Description
Five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award Pete Fromm returns with his big-hearted new novel, a love story about family and resiliency and second chances. For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn a baby is on her way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow. With a supporting cast as rich and compelling as the wild Montana landscape, the novel follows Taz’s first two years as a father―a job no one can be fully prepared for.
With more than eleven books in over twenty years, Pete Fromm has become one of the West’s best literary legends. A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How To Do beautifully captures people who end up building a life that is both unexpected and brave.
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