The Limits by Nell Fruedenberger

 

What happens to teenagers when their highly successful professional parents divorce?  Pia is fifteen.  Her mother is a marine biologist and lives in Tahiti studying coral and the effects of climate change on it.  Her father is a professor in New York.  After they divorced, she has lived with both of them at times as well as a year in Paris with her mother's sister.  Now with Covid and lockdown, she needs to make a decision for the coming school year.

Pia decides to return to New York and live with her father.  But she doesn't know that her new stepmother, Kate, is now pregnant.  Her mother had encouraged Pia to go to New York because she is uneasy about Pia's friendship, perhaps crush, on a Tahitian diver who works at the institute.  Now Pia will be spending most of her time with a woman she doesn't know, whose existence and pregnancy brings home daily the fact that Pia's family has irrevocably split.  

Kate, in addition to being pregnant, is teaching online.  Pia meets one of Kate's students and forms a friendship with her.  The girls start meeting and roaming the city.  They go to the island where Pia's father shares a cottage with his brothers.  Pia meets a boy who she thinks she might sleep with.  She also continues her relationship by phone with Tio, the diver on Tahiti her mother hoped to separate her from.  Eventually, everything comes to a head and Pia needs rescuing from her situation. 

Nell Fruedenberger has written several other novels which have been published to acclaim.  She tends to specialize in family relationships and especially the perils of teen relationships.  Pia is loved by both of her parents but their separation leaves her feeling that she is on her own and that is a fairly common feeling among teens of divorce.  While highly successful adults tend to their pressing careers and job responsibilities, children can be left alone to try to make their own decisions without the adult skills to do so.  Blended families now make up forty percent of existing families and sometimes the children fall through the cracks.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.