Reviewed by Aimee Piper
by Katie Ward (Fleet: 2024)
Set in the disparate worlds of Las Vegas and Cambridge, Katie Ward’s second novel, Pathways, explores the restrictive relationship between femininity and identity. The novel plots the changing relationship between two women – Cara Brenner, a neuroscientist, and her ‘stepdaughter-in-waiting’ (p. 61) Heather Wycliffe, in the aftermath of the upheaval of their family unit.
Following the departure of Heather’s biological parents, work-focused Cara and free-spirited Heather, re-evaluate their relationship outside the roles of (almost) stepdaughter and stepmother. Struggling to see eye-to-eye, they become nothing more than ‘housemates’ (p. 61). In the wake of their deteriorating relationship, Heather leaves for Las Vegas, her departure punctuated by the distressed cries of a blackbird becoming ‘louder’ (p. 108). Like a fledgling leaving the nest, Heather’s departure signifies her severance from the domestic space, but also her departure from childhood.
Despite this departure, entrapment permeates the entirety of the novel. Cara is stuck within her career and stifling insecurity – despite her success as a neuroscientist, she regards herself as a ‘bad daughter, an unfeminine partner and a reluctant step-parent’ (p. 334). Cara cannot conceive herself outside the roles that women are expected to play, as her career is overshadowed by her feminine failings. Heather is also trapped within her own identity, exasperated by her anxiety surrounding the future. She perceives herself as fragmented, seeing a ‘multiverse [of] Heathers’ (p. 168) as her reality is riddled with expectations of who she is supposed to be. She questions ‘why can’t I just have a nice life […] isn’t that enough’ (p. 281) – overwhelmingly, women are cast in multiple roles, their existence never merely enough.
However, Katie Ward offers hope through female connection. Despite the distance between the pair, emphasised structurally through the alternating third person perspective, the use of disrupted sentences connects Heather and Cara once again. Emulating the poetic line break, Ward often ends a chapter on a disrupted sentence, finishing it in the next chapter from the other character’s perspective. Entangling their lives together, Heather and Cara complete each other’s narratives.
Perhaps what Ward highlights is that departure is necessary. In the absence of the expectation to fulfil the roles of stepdaughter and stepmother, Cara’s and Heather’s lives can be woven back together again.
Katie Ward will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event on Thursday 8th May 2025.
You can buy tickets here: https://www.suffolkbookleague.org/events-1/katie-ward
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