In How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund, Magda is mourning the loss of her best friend. Her routines, colleagues, and anxious therapy patients dot her world, and she has a sort of truce with Sarah’s widower. Magda discovers that Sarah had mapped out a road trip for them to take to celebrate Magda’s 70th birthday.

When Sarah’s husband asks Magda to take care of her ashes, Magda hits the road, following the planned trip, recounting her friendship with Sarah, and coming to terms with how she really felt about her friend. She meets some characters along the way and faces some truths about herself.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s a road trip book, but with the twist of one of the friends being dead. Pieces of Magda and Sarah’s history unfold in each road trip stop until we get a full picture of the past and learn that it’s never too late to live your truth.

I'm sad to say that this book was a miss for me. I had high hopes since it was marketed as funny and compared to Remarkably Bright Creatures (which I loved). I didn't find it funny at all and struggled to finish.

This is a process book; expressive and beautifully written, but slow. Most of the plot is rumination of a relationship. It checks the box for a LGBTQ+ novel. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

This was a DNF for me. As a therapist, I struggled to align with the main character and find her likeable. Her wanting to "fix client's bad habits" is not my approach and just did not make for a relaxing read for me.

Magda’s life is just fine. Well, ok, she lost he best friend Sara recently and life has been a bit of a struggle since then. Sara was always a bit more of a birthday person than Magda was, and always wanted to outdo her plans for Magda’s big day. While reading her journals after her passing, Magda finds the plans for hr 70th birthday. So with Sara’s urn in the passenger seat, Magda takes off on the planned road trip.

I was a bit worried to start this book since it was about grief, I mean hello that is my life these days, why do I need to read about it? I really enjoyed following along as Magda found her way through her grief, but also found a bit of herself along the way. Overall I really enjoyed this read!

Thank you to @eccobooks for my gifted copy of this book!

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is at its essence, an exploration of grief and healing. This Anna Montague novel is not at all what I thought it would be when I began reading, and initially I felt confused and unsure where this novel was headed. This genre is not usually what I read, but having started, I felt I needed to continue and discover what Montague intended. Magda is an unusual protagonist. She is a 70-year-old psychiatrist, who isolates herself in her apartment when not at work. Celebrating even her birthday with friends is difficult for her.

Not many books focus on grief-stricken women of Magna's age. Her grief, and an all-consuming pity, at the sudden death of her close friend, Sara, is so consuming that I kept waiting for someone to prescribe antidepressants. But it turns out that what Magda needs is time spent with Sara, who is now ashes in an urn. Magna and Sara set out on a road trip, which Sara had planned before her death. This is book is different, and I am sure that I am making it sound even stranger. The beginning of How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is tough to get through, but once the road trip begin, there is a much needed plot arc to the story that captivates readers. This part pf the book works much better than the opening chapters, which are largely vignettes.

I am recommending How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?, knowing that it will not appeal to all readers, and yet, grief is something we all experience and understand. Thank you publisher and NetGalley for providing me with this ARC. The comments above are my honest feelings. 3.5 stars

Many thanks to NetGalley and Ecco for gifting me a digital ARC of the debut book by Anna Montague. All opinions expressed in this review are my own - 3.5 stars rounded up!

Magda Eklund is turning 70 and still working as a therapist in a group practice with friends from school. She's always been on her own except for the close friendship she shares with Sara. When Sara dies, she becomes adrift. Sara's husband gives Magda all Sara's kept letters and journals, and Magda finds out that Sara's plans for her big birthday were for the two of them to go on a road trip to meaningful places in their lives. Magda decides to take that trip with Sara beside her in her urn.

This was an alternately humorous and thoughtful look at grief and coming to terms with our own wants and desires. We learn about how Magda's childhood growing up with Swedish immigrant parents and younger sister, Hedda, shaped her. It's wishing for second chances when the possibility is long past, but still being able to forge on a new path. I was sometimes a bit confused with the characters for some reason, and kept looking up names to see just where they fit in. But it was a solid debut and I'm looking forward to reading more from this author!

I was initially really moved by what I thought the primary theme of this book would be: a woman navigating the loss of a best friend/soulmate. There were definitely beautiful moments and I found myself underlining/crying at many sections. However, I didn’t connect with Magda and by the end found her self pity—despite being surrounded by many people who love her—to be almost unbearable so found myself eager to be done with her.

This was a cute one. I don’t have much to say about it since it doesn’t have much going on. It was a quick and cute story about aging and grief that was refreshing, but unfortunately nothing inherently interesting within the story itself. Of course I always appreciate a queer touch in all of my books, which is why the last third of this book was by far the most compelling to me. Prior to that though, the book started to drag, which shouldn’t be possible considering how short it was, but alas.

This book is like if Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie and Four Squares by Bobby Finger had a baby. Unfortunately, this book has much less to say about its main character than those too and leaves a little something to be desired, but is still fun and bright nonetheless.

Refreshing plot about a 70 year old psychiatrist processing her grief on a road trip. The book combines humor and emotion in a balanced way while dealing with several tender subjects. Definitely recommend this one if you are looking for a poignant, different story with LGBTQ rep.

What exists between what is and what isn’t

Therapist Magda Eklund is nearing her 70th birthday and despite the concern of her friends and colleagues Boomer and Theo insists that she is fine. Really. Okay, maybe she still deals with some anxiety after the events of 9/11 and has refused to step on a plane ever since, but she is living her life. She works with her patients and helps them deal with their anxieties and assorted other problems, and while she still mourns the recent loss of her closest friend Sara she is making every effort to be helpful to Sara’s husband Fred, with whom she’s never gotten along. It’s only natural that she feels lonely and a bit adrift; she and Sara did everything together….movies, food, even travel….and it was Sara who always planned Magda’s birthday parties. When Boomer and Theo host a small birthday dinner for Magda and Fred shows up not only late but with his (surprise!) new girlfriend, its more than she can take. Amongst those of Sara’s possessions that Fred has been unloading upon Magda is her journal, and in it Sara was making plans for a road trip that she and Magda were to make together. Their friendship had been strained in the period before Sara’s sudden passing, and Magda thinks that maybe making that trip herself (with the urn containing Sara’s ashes along for the ride) would be a way to reach a measure of reconciliation. For someone whose profession is helping others to reveal those things they’ve hidden from themselves and/or the world, it seems that Magda has repressed a great deal of herself throughout her life…but maybe there is still time to acknowledge truths that she has avoided and in doing so start a new chapter in her life.
Friendship between women is a very tricky thing, and as the opening quote from author Patricia Highsmith says, “…friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people.” Magda and Sara needed things from one another that they couldn’t, or didn’t dare, seek elsewhere. Growing up in a very strict family with Old World values, Magda wanted and felt things that her parents (in particular her mother) could not tolerate, and given the times in which she grew up it was easier for her to just not deal with those feelings. She left her midwestern home and made a career in NYC, yet still what she wanted most always seemed just out of her reach. Sara’s marriage was not what she hoped it would be but she was determined to make it at least look like she was happy, even though she never had the children she so desperately wanted and her husband’s flaws wounded her deeply. A trip the two women took to Boston changed their friendship, and Sara would die before the two could get it back on course. As Magda slowly reveals the dynamics in their relationship and her true feelings for Sara, the reader also sees the letters that Sara wrote to Magda when off travelling with Fred, which help explain just why Magda didn’t like him very much. There are so many quirky and endearing characters sprinkled throughout the book, and both Magda and Sara are very relatable. I felt that the book started out very slowly and my attention would wander a bit, but my growing fondness for Magda and my desire to see just what caused their friendship to fray kept me going. There are questions of sexuality and identity, the boundaries between friendship and marriage that must be navigated, and the role that family plays in each person’s life at the root of the story. I found it more melancholic with occasional bursts of humor than an overall funny story, but others might see it differently. The slow pacing lessened my enjoyment of the story, but the characters who inhabited the pages helped make up for that to a degree. Readers of Elizabeth Berg, Jacquelyn Mitchard and Elinor Lipman might find this novel to their liking. My thanks to NetGalley and Ecco Press for allowing me access to an early copy of this novel of loss and hope.

Magda Eklund is a 70 year old practicing psychiatrist whose closest friend, Sara, has unexpectedly died despite having been consumed with extending her own longevity with reams of kale and chalky protein shakes. Magda is in such despair — going to the movies alone, going to dinner alone, going on vacation alone — that she unspools an elaborate fiction for her sister, Hedda, omitting that Sara had passed away and, when Sara’s husband, Fred, introduces his new girlfriend, Gloria, at a dinner party, a mere six months after Sara’s death, Magda faints.

Fred gives Magda Sara’s correspondence and the urn containing Sara’s ashes explaining, “I need you to watch the urn. Just while Gloria settles in.” In Sara’s effects, Magda learns that Sara had planned a road trip for the two of them. “Places that mattered to us, places we wanted the other to see.” Magda did not believe that the road trip would have occurred if Sara survived “given how things had been between them toward the end.” The easy rapport of their friendship had given way — after Sara remained with Fred despite his infidelity — to something more polite and distanced, with Sara often distracted and forgetful. Nonetheless, with the encouragement of her colleagues, Boomer and Theo, Magda jettisons her structured life and embarks on the road trip that Sara had imagined to navigate their relationship and to explore her own past.

Magda’s travels take her to Virginia, Tennessee, New Orleans, Texas and New Mexico, where she interacts with a succession of engaging characters, but the real power of the journey is Magda coming to accept and find comfort and happiness in her sexual identity. Magda wanders into a women’s retreat, where the director’s words prove prophetic: “The real trips happen here, in our heads. In our hearts.” Montague’s debut artfully and sensitively explores universal themes such as friendship, loss, regret, aging and self-discovery. This debut novel gave me Sigrid Nunez vibes. Thank you Ecco and Net Galley for this advanced copy of a novel that delivers both humor and pathos.

I thought this was an interesting exploration of loss and grieving and discovering things about yourself that may have been kept hidden. I liked the road trip premise and enjoyed the people Magda met along the way. I was a bit less compelled with her connections with people in NYC (I never saw her two partners as much beyond caricatures) and the "reveal" at the end was quite predictable. That said, the writing was good, and it definitely had poignant moments that really worked.

3-3.5 stars for me, I'm wavering. The beginning was very confusing and bounced around a lot from the present to flashbacks without much preamble. It wasn't until I got further into the book that either I got better at following the leaps, or the leaps made more sense. The story was much sadder than I anticipated. It wasn't as funny as the title, summary, and cover give the impression of. I felt so sad for this woman who didn't know herself and who wasn't able to express herself truthfully around her closest friends. I really liked the last 15% or so. I wish more time had been spent on Magda coming into her own. I felt it took way too long to get there and not enough time was spent on the more important plot points in the process.

gorgeous book with a lot of inspiration it has to tell people. inspiring, passionate, emotional, super cool and interesting. 4.5

This book hits close to home. The loss of her best friend causes Magda to confront her work and personal life, grief, and her upcoming 70th birthday. The road trip with her friend’s ashes turns into a voyage of self-discovery. It was not the fun, quirky girls’ trip story I expected, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story nonetheless.

I will confess that it was the fact that Cynthia Nixon narrates the audiobook that got me to pick this one up. There's plenty to love here but the story didn't hang together for me as a unified whole.

Interesting comparisons to Less and remarkably Bright Creatures. I think this omission more in line with Britt Marie or 100 year old man. Definitely a day in the life. Not much plot here. Just ok.

Magda Eklund is a psychiatrist, she listens and tries to advise her patients as best she can to help them live better lives. Magda is lost when her best friend Sara dies. She goes on the road trip that they had been planning to take and finds herself along the way. This story is a coming of age type of story. Magda spent her life hiding from herself, her past and love. When she loses Sara she's forced to confront all of the things that she never wanted to explore within herself. Wonderful story of love, loss and finding oneself again.

The comparison books mentioned in various publicity pieces for this book were not a match for me. This book was fine - not great and not bad. Had an interesting premise but didn’t deliver as expected.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco for the opportunity to read this ARC.