Balancing Acts

By Zoe Fishman
Harper Paperbacks, $13.99, 365 pages

At a 10-year college reunion in New York City, Charlie, a co-owner of a new yoga studio in Brooklyn, convinces three of her college acquaintances to form a small-group yoga basics class on Saturday mornings. Over the course of the six weeks of the class, the introspective quality of yoga helps each of the women to balance the reality of life with the vision of life she’d had for herself while in college.

Bess, a journalist, is stuck writing snarky captions at a tabloid magazine, while resisting a move to Los Angeles to be with her boyfriend. Sabine, who once wanted to be a writer, is now an editor of romantic novels, and about to have a first date with her longtime subway crush. Ex-model and photographer Naomi, now a single mother, is experiencing early symptoms of MS. Charlie, who came to yoga after abruptly leaving a career on Wall Street, still struggles with a breakup she went through two years earlier.

With its four unmarried women, in their early 30s but obsessed neither with finding Mr. Right nor with synchronizing their lives to their biological clocks, Balancing Acts is a refreshing addition to women’s fiction. Author Zoe Fishman maintains a tight structure as she rotates between protagonists’ different perspectives, using the six yoga classes as the basis for the plot’s pacing.

Reviewed by Megan Just