In Rebecca Chace's new novel, Talking to the Wolf (Red Hen Press; 208 pages), three friends in their mid-50s—Val, Sasha, and Lauren—prepare for their thirty-fifth high school reunion while mourning the recent loss of the fourth member of their group, Cora. Val, a former aspiring rockstar, searches for a sense of purpose. Sasha, a successful scientist, faces a crucial grant meeting and a double mastectomy. Lauren is in a deteriorating marriage and struggles to connect with her stepchild. The story unfolds over a single day and is interwoven with flashbacks through each character's point of view.

Chace excels at building deep, layered characters, but the novel's strength lies in the multiple ways it subverts our expectations. The characters buck traditional archetypes we typically encounter in fiction. Val is long past her days as an almost-rockstar, but rather than trying to reclaim her career or brood over what could have been (as, say, Richard Katz in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom), she is more concerned with living in the present and finds solace in her job as a dog walker.

Sasha was once an outsider, the last to join the group as a scholarship kid from Queens arriving at private school. But rather than despising her outsider status and becoming a craven social climber who treats her former peers with scorn (a throwback, but think Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair), Sasha appreciates her lasting friendships. Much of what we learn about the group's history is told through flashbacks from Sasha's point of view, and she's the most interested in uniting her friends and helping them find closure.

Lauren was the rich trust-fund kid who, as Cora notes, "Always made you look twice in her Joypoppers T, high cheekbones and boy cut from the barbershop on Aster Place." Often, such characters play a central, dominating, and sometimes vicious role in a private school dynamic (like, say, Blair Waldorf in Gossip Girl), but Lauren is a detached observer, more focused on her failing marriage than on Cora's death. If these characters had simply fit into the mold of what we typically encounter, the book would quickly feel flat; but thankfully, these departures from archetypes foster reader investment and propel the novel’s exploration of friendship in fresh ways.

The depth of these characters further grows through smaller, distinctive flourishes. Val struggles in her day-to-day life, feeling lonely and cut off from the world. Yet, her job lets her communicate primarily with dogs, perhaps because they show her love and don't disagree with her. This echoes what she likely wanted while she was in a band. Lauren, thanks to her independent wealth, decides she will give her apartment to her wife if they break up, which seems habitual after we read a flashback in which she gave a previous ex the apartment they lived in. (In a housing crisis, perhaps breaking up with Lauren is the best way to secure an apartment in New York City.) The novel is also filled with repeated mentions of Sasha's breasts, from both herself and others. They are a defining feature for her and one she is about to lose. Many of these moments add levity, though a brief late flashback reminds us of the downside of such features for an innocent teenager.

Still, it's fair to question how Cora is presented in the novel. The book opens with Cora's narration of her accident, presenting her as stuck in a sense of purgatory. She states, "I have to find Val. Force her to listen to me even if I don't deserve it." We're given the impression that perhaps resolving some lingering issues will "fix" Cora. Through her point-of-view sections, as a ghost or omniscient narrator, she shares a few memories of the groups and editorializes on their lives. She's most closely bonded with Val, and Val believes Cora is still speaking to her, likely because of how they left their relationship prior to Cora's death. But Cora's narration becomes less prevalent as her friends approach their reunion, and she seems a bit less interested in Sasha and Lauren. How would the book read differently without Cora's voice if she were only presented through the other characters' memories? On one hand, Cora's narration can feel uneven at times, and some of her editorials feels unnecessary. On the other hand, if she had no voice in the story and existed only within the memories of her friends, isn't that a book we've read a dozen times before? Chace makes a deliberate choice to include Cora's voice, and ultimately it's hard to argue it's a detraction when the alternative would feel cliché.

Many of the books we read don't offer much room for interpretation. They feature inarguable truths that we accept as we follow a story. But sometimes we encounter a book like Talking to the Wolf that affects different readers at different points in their lives. It's a story about four friends whose relationships lasted from seventh grade until their mid-50s. It's also a story about how the strongest of friendships can slowly drift apart. It's a story about grieving a dead friend, and also about how individual people respond to death in different ways. Reading this novel before a high school reunion with best friends from childhood will hit a lot differently than reading it at home as we wonder why certain people won't RSVP to our wedding. Sometimes we feel thankful for our closest friends, and sometimes we feel the pain of realizing we haven't talked to the people we love in months. Those looking for a straightforward narrative that dictates how to emotionally respond to a story are unlikely to find satisfaction with this book, but Chace deserves immense credit for crafting a story that provides space for readers to interpret its emotional threads in different ways.

Ultimately, Talking to the Wolf is an emotional, at times light-hearted, exploration of friendships, loss, and uncertainty. The way Chace attacks character archetypes and common fictional tropes, turning them on their side in unique ways, keeps the story moving. It's bound to elicit different emotional responses from different readers, but there's a reward in reading a novel that allows for such differences.