Four messily intertwined lives, a lot of soapy melodrama, and a time of healing light the way in Barbra O’Neal’s This Place of Wonder. The narrative bounces between operatic moments of melodrama and quiet character introspection, and the two extremes never really balance out, though they do make for moments of giggleworthy, ripe humor.

When we first meet sommelier and vintner Maya Beauvais, she’s chopping open casks of wine as an act of rage, an accident among many spurred by her alcoholism. She’s sent off to rehab, where she later receives the news of the death of her father, celebrity chef Augustus, who dies unexpectedly at a fairly young age in the kitchen of his restaurant. She subsequently struggles with sobriety and several unplanned twists to her personal life. Even then, Maya must grapple with the bitter sadness that arises from the fact that she and Augustus never made up after their most recent – and final – row.

Meadow Truelove-Beauvais is lost in her own whirlpool of grief when she gets the news of his death from Augustus’ current girlfriend, Norah. Meadow and Augustus rose up from nothing and created his empire together, but his constant infidelities tainted their twenty year long marriage and ultimately resulted in them living apart. She’s Augustus’ second ex-wife, the first being Maya’s mother, who drank herself to death in a fleabag apartment with a young Maya present. Meadow is an organic farmer, running a farm named Meadow Sweet Organic Farm… and she has an extremely dark past hidden far, far behind her.

Norah is the latest in a long line of girlfriends/mistresses Augustus has had since Meadow, but she’d staked everything on a whirlwind romance with Augustus, which is only nine months old at the time of his death. She’d moved all the way from Boston to be with him, leaving behind a promising journalism job but also a dead-end personal life which had mainly been spent in foster care without family roots. Now she has no claim on Augustus’ money or his property, forcing her to start over again. It doesn’t help that she has a simmering obsession/attraction to Meadow, which adds a… well, unique twist to her grieving process. She finds herself breaking into Augustus’ mansion to sniff his clothing and lie among his pillows – behind Maya and Meadow’s back.

And then there’s calm, centered Rory – Maya’s adopted sister, Meadow’s other daughter, and a woman with a seemingly well-established life. She has two children, a happy marriage, and is the polar center of the stormy women who circle around her.

Family drama settles in when Meadow asks Norah to leave Augustus’ home in favor of Maya moving in, fresh from rehab. As Meadow works to get Peaches and Pork, Augustus’ restaurant, back in order, Maya thinks of her traumatic childhood, tries to climb back on the horse jobwise, and enters into a messy love life with the possibility of a happy outcome, but her sexual past might be a bit of a problem. Elsewhere, Norah tries to stake a claim in Augustus’ world while battling poverty. All four women wait breathlessly while Augustus’ death is looked into by the coroner – to find out if he was murdered, or simply suffered a cancer-induced cardiac arrest.

The problem with centering ones’ book around a genius chef is that it’s hard to tell they’re really a genius unless we can taste their food! Thus This Place of Wonder’s attempt at justifying the genius of Augustus pales in the face of him being a bad husband and a bad father, though O’Neal tries hard to show that he cared about these women and simply, predictably, made terrible choices with his personal life. But the whole book is about them, their mourning of him, and how they make tribute to or denigrate him. He is a suffocating presence, impossible to escape, and all the other male characters in the book outside of Rory’s husband are equally awful.

I have no idea why the book synopsis declares that its narrative is split between four characters, when it’s really about Maya, Meadow and Norah. Rory barely factors into the narrative and doesn’t get any PoV chapters; she is settled and happy, and generally reacts with great emotion to new narrative bumps , but is a superfluous character overall.

Among our main narrators, I liked iron-willed Meadow the most, even if she is so hung up on Augustus she…well, I’ll let the book tell that tale. Maya is a wonderfully complicated mess, struggling to be a new version of herself, failing, succeeding, loving. There are some great details here related to how she tries to keep sober, like how Maya relies on candy to give her a sugar rush that keeps her on the wagon. But as much as I sympathized with Norah’s plight, she came off as a little too obsessed to be a person I could comfortably root for.

The book suffers severely from infodumping, mainly from Norah, who researches Meadow’s life and lays out obvious plot clues that are eventually filled in by flashbacks from Maya or Meadow. Instead of letting things come out organically, we get big chunks of reminiscence. It would be so much more satisfying if the characters were allowed to talk. It also bears a severe problem with tone – big, soap opera dramatics inveigh on the simple character study in a way that grates. The book also tries too late to whip up tension about the mystery of Augustus’ death, though it doesn’t seems to matter to many of these characters if he was murdered or simply keeled over.

Overall, This Place Of Wonder is one of those middle-of-the-road reads that’s too fascinating to entirely dismiss, but its characters are so stuck in the past that even the present reads like an endless interrogation of it. The book needed to be about more than their grief over this one man, but he continues to live on, even into the future. So it may be in life, but in fiction it doesn’t have to be.

Note: This book includes on-page descriptions of child rape and on-page miscarriage.

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