Harriet Klausner's Review Archive
Jenny knows she loves her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Wilder, but has problems relating with his two children, Rusty and Patsy, from his first marriage. Worse, on the Manhattan mind of Jenny is being marooned in Brevert, South Carolina where her patients bore her with their southern tales of woe. More and more Jenny feels hopeless and trapped. She wonders if this is all there is too life? Her deep melancholy always surfaces when her marine spouse is deployed or on an exercise.
Jenny escapes into the chat room where she becomes the wild and free Zan. Relishing life to the fullest at the offshore island of StElene, each evening Zan meets her online lover, Reverby, who makes her soul sing. Over time the line between her life with Charlie and her "affair" with Reverby blurs. She struggles to separate the two and begins to lean more towards disappearing into the virtual world where life is enjoyable and fun instead of the mundane reality of responsibility.
Needing a warning label that chat room lovers beware the intrusion of reality, @EXPECTATIONS is a great modernization of the love triangle. The third party being an online figure turns the relationships into a combination of real and virtual. The story line centers on Jenny's two lives converging, with the sad refrain that she believes the virtual is better than the real. Think Supertramp's Logical Song and you have Jenny trying to recapture what she feels she lost. The plot works because the talented Kit Reed makes Jenny's descent seem genuine and plausible.