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Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things.

She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.

Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.

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(view spoiler)[Boy, oh, boy, I guess Julia (aka Jules, my granddaughter’s nickname) has her hands full with her son about to get married and her daughter who is trying to estrange herself from her mother. Can’t be all good. I know some mother/daughter relationships are strained just because they’re both female and that alone can cause problems. Lol Guess we’ll see.
I like Sunny and her quirky ways. I don’t know that Julia is too fond of her son getting married, though. In the cover jacket it says something about Julia going back to her “seductive resurgence of the past�, so I’m beginning to think at this point that maybe Helen Russo caught Julia and her son together and that’s the issue between them? But I have a feeling either Julia is going to have another affair with Nathaniel or she’s going to start being a little hussy/have other affairs with men. Maybe she’ll meet a guy at her son’s wedding. Since he’s a “straight-arrow� I assume he won’t like it if his mother starts hooking up with men. (hide spoiler)]