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Gail Loose is an ex-pat New Yorker living with her British husband in the English countryside, and fulfilling her life-long dream of telling stories and writing books.
Although a software developer by profession Gail never abandoned her trunk-full of story ideas, character sketches and writing snippets that she produced over the years, which is both her writer’s life-line and reminder of her raison d’être.
Gail has been writing full-time since 2010. She has published short stories in her writing group’s 2014 anthology, 'Bright Familiar Surrounds', and is currently writing her second novel, while corralling ideas for her third.
Reviewed by Hilary Hawkes for Readers' Favorite
Dinner with the Thought Police by Gail Loose is a well-written and thought-provoking story. Arden, 34, enjoys her job as advice columnist and radio show presenter in New York, but her life has been hampered by the effects of her upbringing. Her father is a psychoanalyst and both he and Arden’s mother never missed an opportunity to delve into the emotions of their son and daughter. As a result, Arden felt her feelings and thoughts were possessed or policed by them and weren’t her own, and so she became intensely private and unwilling to express her own feelings. Years on, she is still hiding the unexpected and dreadful trauma she suffered at the hands of her best friend Max when she was seventeen. When her friend Julia invites her to her Thanksgiving house party, Arden is horrified to discover who Julia’s fiancé is. Finally forced to gradually reveal and come to terms with what happened in her past, a life-long weight begins to lift from her shoulders.
This is a excellent novel with a high standard of writing. The plot of Dinner with the Thought Police is well thought out. It unfolds with plenty of surprises and twists and has a nice pace to it. I loved the prologue at the beginning and this really hooked me into the story. The characters are well-defined and believable and Gail Loose shows such insight into their motivations. The personality, emotions and behaviour of the main character, Arden, are especially well explored. Human emotions, broken trust, forgiveness, understanding ourselves and others are the weighty themes that this book tackles, but in an ‘unheavy’, satisfying and often humorous way. This is a story that looks at the way some people's parenting can inadvertently stifle a child’s emotional development with effects and consequences that last well into that young person's adulthood. It is the story of a young woman’s gradual willingness to drop her defenses and face the past, and in doing so open herself up to a better life with better relationships and boundaries. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
