In Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, Jean is almost 40, working an unglamorous job at a newspaper and dutifully caring for her difficult mother. The day we see described feels like a drab, repetitive slog, like all of Jean’s days.  As the only woman writer, Jean is usually assigned ghostwriting the useful household tips (of the dispiriting make-do-and-mend variety). Even the casual enjoyment of an after-work drink are off limits to Jean, since her mother is constantly at home, needing Jean to return.

When a woman writes to the paper in response to a story about pathogenesis in animals, saying she too has had a virgin birth, Jean is assigned to investigate.  This is both a perfect women’s-interest assignment for Jean and a hint of the miraculous in the possible virgin birth. That’s the feel of this whole novel, really, that there’s dull gray world, but there’s still a hint of magic beyond what we can see.

Gretchen, the woman who believes she’s conceived her daughter without a man, doesn’t seem like a weirdo or crackpot. Jean tries to figure out if she’s covering an affair, but Gretchen was in the hospital for 4 months when her daughter would have been conceived, in a ward with three other girls, looked after by nuns. It’s an intriguing premise, there’s not only no secret boyfriend in Gretchen’s past, there are simply no men around, at all, and no unsupervised time, and Gretchen wasn’t even mobile while she was recovering.

Jean finds herself becoming friends with Gretchen, even as she investigates Gretchen’s past to confirm her story. Without spoilers, this leads to personal growth and change for Jean, for Gretchen, even for Gretchen’s daughter Margaret, as Jean becomes her unofficial auntie, a relationship they both love. It’s just such a pleasure to read, as everyone discovers that joys they’d thought were lost are possible again. After months and years of lockdown and then not-actually-lockdown-but-still-covid-times, there’s a real feeling of re-discovery of all the things I stopped doing  for a couple weeks, just to flatten the curve, just to do my part, and then didn’t really do again for years. I loved reading the re-discovery all the characters have here of joys and relationships they’d thought were no longer possible.

There is a weird twist at the end of Small Pleasures, which didn’t really work for me. I just love good gotcha or a final-page surprise in a suspense novel, but it doesn’t really fit here, mostly because we’ve spent the whole book on small compromises and small successes, and a huge final shock felt fake. It’s clear that with the responsibility for her mother, Jean’s options for happiness are limited, so I wasn’t expecting a perfectly happy ending, but I didn’t expect or enjoy an ending that just negated all the growth and change of the book. I also expected and wanted an ending that matched the genre of the rest of the novel. It felt fake and forced, in the way that a character waking up and discovering the whole story was just a dream is technically an ending, but ugh. I did a quick search to see if I’d missed something, and found that no one else liked the last scene either or felt it added anything to the story.

So overall, I recommend the book, but just stop reading before the last chapter.