ARC Review: Roll the Sun Across the Sky by Barbara Linn Probst

Reading this book was like watching a very self-aware train wreck in slow motion. I recommend.

I recently had the pleasure of receiving an ARC of Roll the Sun Across the Sky by Barbara Linn Probst from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This book in three words: reflective, chaotic, sharp.

Summary: Now in her sixties, Arden Rice has seen it all: three marriages, hardship and wealth, choices she both regrets and defends, all fueled by the same fierce desire—to give her daughter the best possible life. At least, that’s what Arden tells herself. But nothing is simple. Arden is haunted by her impetuous history, with its trail of damage and deception. Yet she’s finally made a life where she can be her best self—until the unthinkable happens, and a train engineer’s lapse in attention leaves two of the people closest to her dead. As she uncovers hard truths about the people she thought she knew best, while simultaneously reflecting on her own worst decisions, Arden must face questions she’s spent a lifetime avoiding: Which acts define a person? Can someone be better than her worst acts?

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I meant what the subheading says: reading this book was watching a very self-aware train wreck in slow motion—pun not intended. Arden Rice is a tough cookie, but the decisions she made to save herself throughout the years have condemned more than a handful of sorry souls.

In her sixty years of life, she’s left broken hearts and broken reputations in her wake, each time convincing herself that not only did she do herself a favor, she did her victims a favor too. In this way, Arden is the perfect unreliable narrator, which is one of my favorite tropes.

Mother-daughter relationships just so happen to be another one of my favorite tropes. The publisher makes the comparison to Tom Lake by Ann Pratchett, and it’s not without legs. Yet, instead of revealing a youthful history of novelty and levity that eventually softens into the humble content of married life, Arden’s youth is more of a garbage fire that somehow puts itself out and relights itself on the same coals from the last fire.

And while I spent half of the novel wondering how on earth someone could justify such mistakes, I spent the other half marvelling at how much I came to like Arden anyway. At times, I even found myself envying how relentlessly confident she was that she would land on her feet, no matter how high flames raged behind her.

She’s an anti-hero for sure, but the fact that she owns up to her shortcomings makes you want to forgive her, even as she struggles to forgive her daughter for repeating so many of her own mistakes. Plus, I’ve always had a soft spot for senior narrators.

And on top of all that, the writing was fantastic. It was blunt, unflinching, and shamelessly real. Arden’s voice is extremely realized, and even though the prose alternates between a first-person past and a third-person present, I never felt jarred. Every turn of phrase had my eyes widening in admiration—Barbara Linn Probst is clever, articulate, and artistic, and she lets you know it on every page. While I thought Arden’s character arc was really well envisioned, I just wish we got a little more time to marinate in it at the end.

I’d recommend Roll the Sun Across the Sky to just about anyone who enjoys family drama and a flagrant female protagonist.