This book is written in a really interesting style. I got about 50% through it and found myself wishing for a change of scenery, more action, fresh characters... Something.

But it was worth holding out for that ending! It was really touching and unique and honestly, the biggest feat of all is that it was *just enough.* It wasn't over-the-top and it didn't feel like an absolute train crash meant only to blindside the reader. It felt like I was seeing it all through Emma's dulled prism, which was even more wrenching. It was agonizingly brilliant.

Emma is a fascinating character overall, actually. When the "event" was revealed, I burst into unexpected (and kind of unusual for me) tears. For someone who grew up wealthy, went to Harvard, wrote a bestseller, became a big shot, but somehow ended up settled in a small town (that part annoyed me at first, but I changed my mind about it by the end) she's very relatable. Flawed in all the ways she hated in others or worried she would be. Smart and capable, but not when it mattered most. I was overcome with empathy for her.

I'd give the first half of this 3 stars, but the second half brought it up to 4 stars for me. Be patient, hold out until the end on this one! I think this would make a great movie, also.


Thank you to #netgalley #atriabooks and #annabruno for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

3 stars!

This book is absolutely devastating to read. And very hard to rate.

Did I enjoy reading this? No.
Was this well written? Very much so.
Did I connect with the characters? No.
Did I skim parts? Yes.

So as you can see, I'm in a bit of a pickle on how to rate this.

On one hand, this is likely the most intimate book I have ever read. And there's something to be said for that. I felt as if I were reading Emma's diary.

On the other hand, there was a lot I skimmed through, because I didn't necessarily care as much about the other characters of this small town.

That may just be me though because this book is not just about grief, but also about living in a small town, and the people that make it up.

This is basically a diary of a woman, sitting in a bar, reliving her happier memories. She's devastated, lost and depressed in her current life (and once you find out why, you will understand), and spends a lot of her night (this book takes place in the span of a few hours), looking back, at happier memories.

It's devastating, brutal and hard to read.

Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for the ARC and wanting my honest opinion!

Ordinary Hazards opens in a small-town bar, The Final Final, in a small New York town. This is the story of Emma, who came to the town from a privileged upbringing and love lost. Emma's dreams of her future seem to have found no purpose in her current living situation, but dreams, like Emma, change. The regulars at the bar are small-town folk, not the types Emma would've associated with growing up, nor the types her father, who she adored, would've encouraged her to meet. And over the course of the book, a slow and steady tension builds, between family, friends, work, home, and all environments. There are people who hold power, people who want power, and people whom power has ignored. There's Emma's search for love, a life worth living, and everything in-between. In short: this is a quiet, intimate book, best enjoyed in front of a roaring fire or while listening to crickets chirping outside. This is a book that is simple, but packs a punch - and I'd say the Celeste Ng comparisons are well-earned.

Thank you to Atria Books for sending me a galley of this novel for an honest review.

This book was extraordinary. Taking place over one night in a dive bar in upstate New York, Emma winds us in a journey through the past and present that builds an absolutely gut wrenching story.

This story tackles, love, loss, grief, ambition, parenthood, and friendships. Emma’s voice is so clear it’s almost as if a friend is telling you a story over drinks. Her recognition of thought and feeling sucks you deep into the story of the past and the present.

The only way I can describe it is like a snowball rolling down a hill. As it falls, more complex emotion builds. Eventually when you stand back, your view is a great perspective on the human experience.

Emma is at the bar the final final in her small town. She is drinking to remember the good times and to forget the bad. She met her ex husband Lucas at this bar. She is now sitting there surrounded by his friends and acquaintances.

The story is told from Emma’s point of view in the past and present. She has had success, heartbreak and great loss. As she sits at the bar she ponders the past and the future. I feel like there were a lot of characters in the book for it to basically take place over one night. It was a bit much at times.

The story was good but it felt like a continuation of another book almost. This was my first time reading this author and I am interested to see what other stories she has to tell.

I really enjoyed this book and I read it in two days. Although I was hesitant about the book taking place over the course of a single night, the author balances between past and present in a way that leaves the reader wanting more. There are so many compelling themes throughout this book: grief, love, fear, loss, guilt, family, and relationships. Although the story between Emma and Lucas was heartbreaking, the relationship and characters were so real. Overall, a very good read.

This is intense, heartbreaking, emotional but also realistic story about grief, long time friendships, broken families, life choices people made, a person’s ambitions, regrets and resentments. And the remarkable thing about the story-telling: all of the characters are so real, make you feel like they’re your own neighbors, childhood friends, colleagues. All of them suffer from their own mistakes, personal dramas and their redemption;

The story takes place at small New York bar town named “Final Final”: locals gathering to chat, having a few drinks, playing pool, getting rid of their daily problems. It reminds you of Cheers’ theme: this place is you want to be where you can see, our troubles are all the same, you want to be where everybody knows your name. Emma does the same like all the regular customers and finds herself nursing regular drink, sitting on her regular stool around 5 p.m.

As soon as she starts sipping her drink and eavesdropping the chats of men she’s been knowing for a long time: they are her ex-husband’s Lucas’ friends, the memories starts overflowing into her mind starting with her blind-blind date in the very same bar with Lucas: remembering how they met at the first time on her birthday, how their relationship evolve and of course Lucas’s childhood friends’ involvement into their lives.

We don’t know why they divorced, why Emma is so sad, why she questions everything about her life including her wealthy childhood times, her efforts to get her own father’s approval and earning his love. Then her first step to work at Wall Street, her ambitions to be successful. Yes you may sense that’s some big tragedy changed her life forever and made she and her husband drifted apart. Why is she hiding from?
The story takes mostly at one place: Final Final: the bar’s name was like omen, because the entire characters have to deal with a common tragedy that hold them back to move on their lives and they have to face their own guilt feelings, anger and resentment. They have to FINALIZE some unfinished businesses. The story ends at the very same time: somebody pulls out a knife and we hear the gun shots!

This is remarkably surprising and impressive reading with its well-crafted, layered characterization and their detailed back stories. The conclusion is heart wrenching and emotional. It forces us to face our own unfinished matters, bottled up regrets about our own pasts. Maybe metaphorically we need to find our own place named “The End” to face with those demons to move on our own lives.

Overall: I truly enjoyed it, especially the ending part of the story was genuine and sad at the same time.
Special thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for sharing this meaningful ARC with me in exchange my honest review.

Ordinary Hazards by Anna Bruno was such a unique read! I loved the cover design of this book, it's gorgeous. Inside, the book is just as good!

This book was so boring. Emma, our narrator, alternates between telling us real-time events happening in the small town dive bar, The Final Final, and showing us flashbacks of her life.

It appears to be a typical city-slicker moves the country type of story. I wouldn't know what it actually is because I only read the first 1/3 of the book. I kept waiting something, anything interesting, and in its absence, I quit reading.

I just couldn’t get into this one as it was just to slow for me and I had a hard time engaging with the characters.

4.5 Stars

As this story opens, the setting is in a small town bar, The Final Final, as the post-work evening begins in this small New York town, a bar where the locals gather, socialize, maybe shoot some pool, have a drink or two. The story of this night unfolds a little at a time, with time going back and forth, and little by little the story unfolds. Emma’s story of how she came to live in this small town, her history as a child living in a wealthy area, a father that she not only adores but spends much of her life wanting to be like, to win his approval, to have the same kind of life, and how things change over time. The man she meets, and eventually falls in love with, and their story, as well. Her dreams about her future, and how her choice of living where she does is somewhat disconnected from her dreams, at least her initial ones. But there’s more. So much more.

The regulars at this bar aren’t the kind of people her father would associate with, at least not willingly or socially. That’s not to say her father was without his own faults, but he would at least appear to be, as Ray Davies once wrote, and the Kinks once sang ”…a well respected man about town, doing the best things so conservatively.” But they suit Emma and Lucas, the man she fell in love with, this small town and these small town friends, living where he grew up.

There’s tension, a tension that rises slowly, not between everyone in this story but tension between family members, between friends, at work, at home. There’s love, as well, and hearts that are broken, but that’s the way life seems to be for all of us, even if it’s more for some than others. And there are those who hold power, and those who wish they did and resent those that do, and those that seem content. There’s the search for wealth in a financial sense, and there’s the search for a life with a wealth of happiness, love and meaning. The kind of life that one can look back on, and say they have few regrets, a life, that in the end was worth living.

It’s rare that I agree with the comparisons between writers / stories, but this is touted as being “for fans of Celeste Ng,” and I’d say this compares on some levels to both of her books that I’ve read, Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. It’s also compared to Claire Messud, but I’ve only read one of her books, and no longer remember it well enough to say. I think in Ng’s stories, they always begin with a small taste of something to remember, and return to that moment in some sense in the end.


Pub Date: 18 August 2020

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Atria Books

I just couldn't do this one. I got about 30% through Ordinary Hazards, and found myself asking "When is something going to happen?". I gave up. The story just seemed to describe people and past events that were not all that interesting. Thank you, NetGalley, for letting me try. This is not a book for readers who are looking for action or mystery or any kind of bling.

Wow, this book took me by surprised in the best possible way! After reading the description for Ordinary Hazards my curiosity was piqued, but I never anticipated Anna Bruno would take me on such a journey! It took me a minute to get acclimated to the tone and writing style, but once I did, I was consumed! Ordinary Hazards has a completely original storyline that will grab you by the heart without you even realizing it—I found myself grabbing for the tissues (and I rarely get emotional while reading)! This 5 star novel would make a fantastic book club selection! I’m shocked to learn this is Anna Bruno’s debut novel because it’s just that so flipping awesome—I am absolutely going to be reading anything and everything she comes out with in the future! A MUST, MUST READ!!!

When a book fails to catch either my imagination or my heart, I usually give up and move on to another book. I almost gave up on this one, but pushed through my initial feelings of dislike and apathy towards the characters the author has gathered in a local bar. Emma is divorced and is spending the evening in a bar and at first I didn’t care enough to continue reading in order to find out what tragedy has caused this smart, talented woman to spend an evening wallowing in self-pity among people she obviously doesn’t like, and who don’t like her much either. But something eventually captured my attention - maybe the author’s way with words, maybe some hint of truth in the conversations she revealed - but soon I was invested in these lives, in these stories of small-town relationships and the hinted-at tragedy at the heart it all. The story unfolds slowly over the course of one long night, and before it is all told, another tragedy strikes. This is a surprising book about friendship and love, about grief, about finding our way when it seems there is no way forward.

I think you have to be in the right mood for this book, which is somewhat contemplative in nature. Readers looking for an action-packed plot should look elsewhere. But if you like character studies, ORDINARY HAZARDS would be a good bet. It's very well written and I didn't find Emma to be as off putting as some other reviewers have. I was interested to see how her life unraveled and what brought her here to this moment in time. The reveals were nicely paced and I appreciated how the book felt like the right length (somewhat shorter than some).

A tale of how ordinary decisions shape our world. Set in a night at the local bar, this story runs the gamut of business to pleasure to soul searching to disaster(s). I wouldn't say I enjoyed the story, and I didn't always agree with the main character's point of view, but it was well written and it makes you think about your choices and how that affects everything.

This is a well written book. It would be hard to recommend this to anyone I know in the real world as the setting is a bar while the protagonist sits on a barstool drinking whiskey. Most of my immediate circle does not drink and would find this offensive. This is the story of how one born to privilege could descend to spending evenings at the town bar. Dad was brutally successful, mom was an alcoholic, who kept up appearances., and their neighbors were caught in a numbers game. Emma through that life away to move to a small upstate town and teach. She wrote a book and was traveling when tragedy struck. There is much in Emma's life that is unfinished. After another tragedy which Emma helped to facilitate she begins to find her way back to her own life. The story ends hopeful, but we do not know how much the events of the evening really changed Emma.

272 pages

2 stars

Another reviewer said it best: “ This book is boring.”

I didn't like Emma. Her self-pity party was too much to bear. The book jumped around without warning. The transitions were poor, so many times I found myself lost. The other patrons in the bar were disagreeable. I did like the bar tender, however. She seemed to be the only one who was on the ball.

I found the whole book depressing and I struggled to finish it.

I want to thank NetGalley and Atria Books for forwarding to me a copy of this book for me to read and review.

Extremely well-written book, and having grown up in a small town with a small-town bar near NYC, the setting was immediately relatable. The plot moved along nicely, but this is mostly a character study - having these interesting relationships alongside an engaging story just...worked. What a debut novel, brava! Thank you to the publisher and author for the review copy.

Ordinary Hazards takes place over the course of one night at a bar where we meet the main character, Emma, as she reflects on her past and its connection to her present. The novel deals with ambition, grief, family, friendship, love, and motherhood. The story has many layers – the author drops hints on what may have happened in the past which propels the story onwards and keeps the pages turning. Thank you to Atria and NetGalley for the opportunity to review an advanced copy