When Mary Forrest receives the gift of an astrological reading for her birthday, she doesn’t expect it to be the harbinger of her life’s imminent upheaval. But this is Mary’s Saturn Return year, her twenty-ninth; the year that the planet Saturn returns to the exact spot it was in when she was born. According to astrology, the return of Saturn brings major life challenges that, if not met, will cycle back again 29 year later.

While skeptical of the reading at first, Mary can’t help but find some truth in it as her mother becomes seriously ill, her job in New York City is at a dead end, and memories of past relationships haunt her. To make it through the year, Mary must overcome intimacy and abandonment issues, resurrect her relationship with her ailing mother, and learn to trust the man she loves.

A novel of flawed but believable characters, Sara Gran’s debut, Saturn’s Return to New York, is an introspective story of the relationships and setbacks that shape us.

It all started when Mary and her best friend went to see a mysticist and palm reader to get their start chart done.

So We start with the general. Your sun sign, which is ruled by fire, is in Scorpio, a water sign, and your moon, which is ruled by water, is in Sagittarius, a fire sign And your rising sign is back to Scorpio again How’s that for conflict?”
She smiles. “Fire and water—no earth. You daydream a lot Your inside life is as big as your external world. Okay, now we’re going to look at your emotional life. Scorpios keep secrets, and they have a lot of secrets to keep, because their emotions are so strong. You have a bad temper, but you don’t let it show. You’re very impatient, you make impulsive decisions. Do you ever meditate?”
I feel guilty as I confess no It’s common knowledge that everyone, everywhere, should meditate
“You should,”

Mary is a bit skeptical but what the lady tells her in very general terms, does come to be and this is what this novel is all about. Coming to terms with a future that doesn’t do well when avoided.

Your Saturn Return is when you become an adult. In this country, they say someone is an adult when he is twenty-one. In my country, as soon as you’re old enough to take care of yourself, you go out and get a job. But this is a different kind of adulthood. This is your spiritual growth, your Saturn Return. Saturn is the father. We take this literally but also metaphorically to mean that which the world wants for you Maybe your father wants you to be a doctor, you want to be a farmer. This is a conflict as old as the hills. Saturn Return is where you reconcile the parts of your life that you’ve chosen with the parts where you’ve let yourself get carried away. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer, he said if you want to write, you have to kill your father This is what Saturn Return is—when you kill your father And you cannot do this until you reach the end of your rope, until you’re desperate Murder is always a desperate act, I think it was Raymond Chandler who said that

And it all starts to come apart when her mother falls ill with the onset of a mysterious disease which sounds a lot like early onset dementia.

Most of all I want to kill the doctors They know nothing. They don’t even pretend to be optimistic anymore. The drug trials have proved as useless as the alternative therapies I’ve essentially bullied my mother into. Chelation therapy lowers her cholesterol, Zyban helps her cheer up, hormone treatments make her hair thicker, but none of them stop the dumb merciless forward motion of the disease

Faced with loosing her mother to this and the early loss of her father, Mary is forced to look at her life and her decisions and see what she wants to do with her life. She stops a situationship with a cook who treated her right as he was also seeing someone else and looking to get engaged. She leaves her job working in the editing / publishing business but not being an actual writer. She takes on full care of her ailing mother.

And it’s a bit heartbreaking hearing about how her mother just slowly starts disintegrating from being a well respected woman, into a wandering mess.

“I don’t know what happened tonight,” she tells me She’s bitter, angry. “I don’t know what to say. I was getting dressed to go out. I felt so good, I was going to go someplace nice for dinner. I thought, tonight I’m going to treat myself All the problems I’ve been having lately. So I got dressed and I went out I went over to Christopher Street, I got there just fine, but it wasn’t there L’Escargot, I mean. It just wasn’t there. So I thought, well, it must be on Tenth Street. So I went over to Tenth Street And then I got confused. I got so fucking confused. Everything was I didn’t recognize anything. All my life I’ve lived in this city, and I didn’t even know where I was. Everything was so fucking different! So I went back to the leather store, where it was supposed to be. I asked where the restaurant was, and then I could tell, I could tell from the way he looked at me something was wrong. That something had changed Oh my God, I started to cry This is all so embarrassing I don’t understand why everything had to change ”

My heart went out to her.

And when she dies, the grieving seems like it was almost done due to the long months of illness and she’s ready to let go.

“They’re happy,” Kyra says emphatically. “I tell you right now, the dead are always happy. And they don’t miss us, like we miss them, because they can see us whenever they like. This would be like me missing you right now. It’s impossible. It isn’t like that. Sometimes they let us know and sometimes they do not, but the dead are always here.

I suppose the book is about coping and waiting for some light at the end of the tunnel.

All in all, the book was a bit meh for me but I can see why other people would love it. Very much exudes New York in every page and a new age vibe.

We’re stuck here in this shit Samsara. Not knowing, not seeing, having to struggle for just a little of that love If we’re lucky we get just a little now and again And on top of this we worry about those who have passed. We worry about the dead, and they get off scot free. We wonder if they were happy, if we did the right thing and said the right words. Most of all we wonder if they loved us, right? We want to know if they loved us