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Undoing I Do by Anastasia Royal
  Why do we always make divorce read so neat and tidy - so linear with easy-to-identify beginnings, middles and endings? Anyone who's evern been through a divorce knows that it's messier than that. More Kafka-esque. Flashbacks - some sweet, some sour - share space with the present tense. Time bends. Hate. Hope. Anger. Incredulity. Despair. They cohabitate. It's a human avalanche. Solid then broken.
  Which is why Anastasia Royal Ginzu'd her debut novel, Undoing I Do, into 335 chapters and two codas. It's a quilt of a novel, bobbing and weaving from poetry to prose, from past to present, from cookies recipies to famous quotes, from conflict to resolution and back to conflict again over the course of a lean 370 pages.
  It's structured, Royal says, like a woman sitting over a rusty old chest, picking out pictures as she struggles to form some kind of order out of the chaos.
  That particular woman, the novel's protagonist, is Claire McCloud, a kind of doppelganger for Royal who shares the author's talents for music, acting and the arts. We arrive in medias res , plunked down into McCloud's mind as her dashing , German-speaking husband, Tobin, is calling it quits. The resulting 300 chapters read like short diary entries, a journaling of this "soulquake" of hers, the breaking and eventual healing of her spirit, the stressful yet humurous adventures of a divorced mother of two entering the workplace and the dating game.
  So it's neither sappy nor clinical. Neither a "pass-the-Puffs" Nicolas Sparks weepie nor a depressing "drop-a-toaster-in-the-bathtub-already" Jonathan Franzen funeral dirge. It's more bittersweet than that, both funny ["Like any normal person, I will readily admit my failings, when blugeoned"] and tragic ["The pieces fall faster than you can pick them up"].
  Maybe the right word is novel, since it's one of the only books we know of that offers an accompanying internet soundtrack to the songs mentioned in the book as well as a YouTube music video, both of which were made by Royal, an Evanston resident, who filmed many of the scenes right here on the North Shore.
  Watch the video and you'll see some familiar sites. Read the book and you'll meet some very familiar characters intertwined in some all-too-familiar tragedies.
  Visit www.undoingido.com for excerpts, music and ordering information.