How can Enid move forward when her marriage, as well as the world she has known, simultaneously fall apart? In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, Enid Alger Kimble, protagonist of Bromwich’s first novel,
Not Your Penance
, seeks to reconcile with her past, and finds, through ruin, rebirth. Having returned to Canada and to work as a lawyer, Enid leaves her surgeon husband, Dr. Arthur Kimble. Trying to find healing and a purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother about which she has felt so ambivalent, Enid travels physically and metaphorically through the ruins of her marriage, the ruins of Classical Greece in the Aegean, and finally the remnants of her own prairie childhood. Enid undertakes a long overdue homecoming to accept the Blackfoot Nation’s offer of COVID 19 vaccinations, as she journeys into single parenting her five children. As far flung and diverse as the first novel in the series is claustrophobic and tense, Ruin offers fresh perspectives on law, midlife, mothering, and divorce. It is a windswept, hope-filled story of reconciliation and redemption through the COVID 19 pandemic, midlife, law, and divorce.