The Mathematics of Change

by Amanda Kabak

The Mathematics of Change breaks open and breaks down the equation of midlife, proving balance is imaginary and change the only possible solution.

The aching and terrible excitement of Carol’s affair with her graduate school professor has settled, fifteen years later, into the frustrated complacency of faculty wife responsibilities and motherhood.

Carol wants more, but can’t have more.

She can’t have as much, surely, as her best friend, the painfully enigmatic Mitch, who keeps their long-ago erotic relationship irritatingly compartmentalized and spends too much time in her secret lair of an engineering lab.
 
She can’t have what the gorgeous new faculty member Abby has — a publishing career, slinky dresses, and a way of prying out vulnerable and damaging confessions from even causal acquaintances.

Mitch knows Carol wants more, but she also knows it can’t come from her. She’s grappling with the terror that comes from knowing she could have everything. Her lab is on the verge of a breakthrough, and then there’s Reginald: warm, funny, British, impossibly long-distance, compelling. Except, she’s not really talking to Reginald, unless she can’t help it. Meanwhile, Carol is talking to her too much and desperately yanking their past out of the mothballs, and Abby’s primary scholarship seems to be predatory and tempting advances.

Mitch could have more than she ever thought possible, but she can’t work out the math.


A darkly witty debut novel from the recipient of the 2017 Al-Simak Award for Fiction from Arcturus and The Chicago Review of Books.

Genres: LGBT, Queer

362 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2017

About the author

Amanda Kabak has had stories published in Midwestern Gothic, Harpoon Review, Perceptions Magazine, and other print and online periodicals. She was a recipient of the Betty Gabehart prize, issued by the Kentucky Women Writer's Conference, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Reviews

[Tayari Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like brave witty novels set in the academy, then this book is the book for you. Full disclosure-- the author was one of my students-- but you can believe me when I tell you that this books is GOOD. Yes, it is a love triangle (quadrilateral, even). But it is way more than that. This is a novel about gender, work, love, and the life of the mind. It is by turns biting and tender. Required reading for the tenure track.

[Susan DeFreitas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with Tayari Jones: THE MATHEMATICS OF CHANGE by Amanda Kabak is a brilliant debut. Sharply drawn characters, snappy dialogue, and darkly funny academic satire--and all three major characters are queer lady people? Yes, please, I'll have another.

[Sheryl Kabak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strong characters trying to deal with their past and move forward to make changes in their lives make for a compelling story in The Mathematics of Change. Relationships that have stood the test of time are challenged as the 3 women the story focuses on struggle to make sense of the upending of their prescribed world.

[Nancy Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Lisa Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expertly written debut novel about female relationships with each other and their significant others.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Mitch and Carol! Their attempts to grow emotionally, deal with pain and strike out in new directions were compelling, sometimes tragic and sometimes inspiring.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE MATHEMATICS OF CHANGE feels like a competent debut novel exploring the intersection of friendship and romance—and what happens when boundaries are overstepped. I actually didn't mind most of the flashback chapters; they helped to make Mitch a more rounded, fully realized character. Her shoulder injury (somewhat clumsily) functions as a stand-in for the emotional pain she refuses to acknowledge, examine, and release, in addition to the consequences of ignoring it. That being said, Carol's backstory did little to humanize or explain her. It perpetuated an unfortunate trope I've seen repeated in other books we're reading and elsewhere: that a relationship with a man is the only kind of relationship that can have life-changing consequences. It's worth exploring why we continue to see pregnancy as a narrative device that uncouples a woman from her bisexual identity and forces her into presumed heterosexuality and, eventually, unhappiness, and it's curious that Carol chooses to not only forgo or forget birth control, which seems unlikely, but also to carry the child and remain in a legal relationship with an individual she never considered a future with. But I digress. Other than Mitch, the characters hardly seem real. They're at times terrible, tedious, and predictable in their contrariness. Both Carol and Dr. Rosen function as overwrought foils for Mitch, and I'm hard pressed to believe that they'd be functional human beings, even in an eccentric academic setting. Ultimately, each woman is forced to challenge their assumed realities and identities to move forward and manage some form of happiness—or at least peace.