Reviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers' Favorite

Isabelle Marsden, "Belle" to everyone, is thirty-four and running from a Chicago life that has hollowed her out. In The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden, Nan Sanders Pokerwinski drops her, fresh out of a job, into a Kansas town chosen almost by accident: a spun map, a pushpin, a little too much bourbon. Belle wants six quiet months to regroup. Instead, she is adopted by a cast of unapologetic eccentrics -- an artist with a pet wallaby, an elderly crossword devotee everyone calls Aquamaureen, a poet who works at a federal penitentiary -- and finds herself, almost accidentally, sculpting an enormous concrete-and-broken-china creation in her own front yard. When the city orders it to be demolished, Belle discovers she is willing to fight for something she cannot fully explain.

The tone shifts fast. On one page I was laughing at Mae's crossword-puzzle etiquette or the wallaby's antics, and the next I was sitting with the quiet horror of what Belle survived at her old job, an assault she's buried so deep that she has to excavate it in stages, surfacing only in dreams and half sentences, the way real memory does. The author doesn't rush her toward resolution or wrap the trauma in a bow, and I appreciated that restraint. This book has earned its whimsy, too. Reba, Mae, Roscoe, the whole gang of Soulstice weirdos, are strange on the page and fully human underneath, and more than once I felt that dizzy, through-the-looking-glass sensation, like I'd wandered into the Mad Hatter's tea party myself. Belle feels it too since Nan Sanders Pokerwinski has her make that exact comparison more than once. Underneath all the whimsy, the plot is structured around two clocks ticking at once: a demolition deadline and Belle's own slow process of facing what she survived at her last job. This is a book for anyone who has ever needed to fall apart somewhere far from home, and for anyone who believes, as I now do, that a pile of broken china can be its own kind of prayer.