Showing posts with label grief/loss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grief/loss. Show all posts
Jun 8, 2019
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May 3, 2018
Apr 1, 2017
Aug 2, 2016
Aug 1, 2016
Jul 1, 2016
May 4, 2016
Jul 2, 2015
Everything I never told you - Celeste Ng
Summary: "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it's the youngest of the family-Hannah-who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened. A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another"-- Provided by publisher.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* A teenage girl goes missing and is later found to have drowned in a nearby lake, and suddenly a once tight-knit family unravels in unexpected ways. As the daughter of a college professor and his stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, Lydia Lee is already unwittingly part of the greater societal changes going on all around her. But Lydia suffers from pressure that has nothing to do with tuning out and turning on. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting. Her mother is white, and their interracial marriage raises eyebrows and some intrusive charges of miscegenation. More troubling, however, is her mother's frustration at having given up medical school for motherhood, and how she blindly and selfishly insists that Lydia follow her road not taken. The cracks in Lydia's perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng's emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Nov 1, 2013
Tell the wolves I'm home - Carol Rifka Brunt
Tell the wolves I'm home - Brunt, Carol Rifka
Summary: It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Brunt's transcendent debut is an exploration of an unlikely friendship that blossoms in the wake of a terrible loss. It's 1987, and 14-year-old June Elbus is reeling from the death of her beloved uncle Finn, a famous painter who has succumbed to AIDS. Shy and introspective, June preferred spending time with Finn, even as she tried to hide, from herself as much as others, her secret crush on him. Finn's death leaves a gaping hole in June's life, and she's shocked when Toby, her uncle's lover and the man her mother holds responsible for his death, makes a bid to fill that emptiness by contacting June secretly. Toby simply wants to get to know her and give her several gifts Finn left for her, and June starts to thaw toward him after she finds a note in a book from Finn imploring her to look after Toby. June's burgeoning but covert friendship with Toby gives her new insight into Finn's life but strains the already tenuous bond between her and her older sister, Greta. Peopled by characters who will live in readers' imaginations long after the final page is turned, Brunt's novel is a beautifully bittersweet mix of heartbreak and hope. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Jun 1, 2012
The art of losing - Rebecca Connell
Summary: Louise, a young woman whose mother, Lydia, died in an automobile accident while she was a child, believes that her mother's lover, Nicholas, caused her death and seeks revenge against him by secretly creeping into his life.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Connell's first novel charts the riveting, decade-long struggle of 20-something Englishwoman Louise to come to terms with losing her mother at the age of 10. In 1983, Oxford professor Nicholas Steiner has a short-lived affair with Lydia, the wife of a university colleague and Louise's mother, before marrying another woman and having a son. Nicholas's attempt at domestic bliss is complicated by an unexpected encounter with Lydia, with whom he renews the affair, which ends only with Lydia's death in 1989. Nearly two decades later, certain that Nicholas is to blame for her mother's death, Louise assumes her mother's name, moves to the town where Nicholas and his family live, and sets out to confront and, she hopes, destroy him. But Louise/Lydia falls in love with Nicholas's son and moves in with the Steiner family, from whom she learns firsthand about life's ambiguities. Connell's story races through a series of breathtaking yet believable surprises, never failing to hold the reader's interest. (Oct.)
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Aug 1, 2011
Summary: Having decided to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by spending the night with a young virgin, an old man falls deeply in love for the first time in his life when he spots the girl at a local brothel. 250,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ The Colombian master storyteller's latest novel is grounded in the steamy atmosphere and gamey politics of his native country; at the same time, in the universality of its theme, it transcends the peculiar traits of his bougainvillea-filled homeland. Composed with the metaphorical lyricism of a parable but without that narrative form's usual moralizing intent, Garcia Marquez's novel briefly but piquantly captures a single year toward the end of a long string of years in the life of a nonagenarian who, ironically, given the length of his tenure on the planet, proves himself still capable of undergoing a significant life alteration. The unnamed protagonist, an unmarried man, is a columnist for the local newspaper, but until this point in time, he has never written anything of lasting value. This memoir, this recollection of the past year, is to be his literary legacy. "The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin," he boldly--and, perhaps, in a delusion of potency--declares. It is soon revealed--sadly--that he has never loved, that his sexual gratification has always been bought and paid for. What his brazen plan to celebrate this milestone birthday comes to entail is a confrontation with a heretofore unrealized aspect of his "inner self"--namely, that sex without love is an empty house in which to dwell. Garcia Marquez's beautiful, poignant story both avoids sentimentality and escapes salaciousness. ((Reviewed August 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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Jul 1, 2011
Simply from scratch - Alicia Bessette
Summary: After she joins a baking contest to try to shake off the lingering grief from her husband's death, Zell Carmichael Roy befriends her nine-year-old next-door neighbor, a motherless girl who joins Zell's quest for dessert-competition glory.
Kirkus Reviews
In this nicely wrought debut, a young widow emerges from her grief thanks to the intrusion of a nine-year-old neighbor and an unwinnable cooking contest.
As the novel opens, Rose-Ellen, Zell to her friends, nearly burns down her house. Attempting to enter the Polly Pinch Desserts That Warm the Soul Baking Contest (a satire of the perky Rachael Ray), Zell doesn't notice there's a wrapped present in her preheating oven. The present was left over a year ago by her late husband Nick in a favorite hiding place from the noncooking Zell, and now it is a cindered mess, left unopened and thrown in the attic. The fire serves as a happy catalyst—she begins to reconnect with old friends whom she's pushed away, and she meets her new neighbor Ingrid, the little girl whose misdelivered Polly Pinch magazine inspired Zell's attempt at baking. It's not the baking that interests either of them—Zell wants the $20,000 cash prize to donate to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund—Nick, who worked for their small-town Massachusetts newspaper, was killed in a freak accident while photographing the rebuilding in New Orleans—while Ingrid is obsessed with Polly Pinch because the motherless girl is convinced Polly is her real mom. Zell goes along with this (though she admits, if the redheaded, freckled Polly Pinch were African-American, she would look an awful lot like Ingrid), but the wild story alienates Ingrid at school, and so she and Zell bond and begin baking together. While Ingrid's hunky dad is busy with law school, Zell, her beloved greyhound Ahab and Ingrid spend countless hours in the kitchen creating perfectly inedible desserts. In a story about loneliness, the two are a perfect fit, both attempting in their own ways to re-create connections to their missing loved ones. Then the unthinkable happens—they finally make something good enough to get in the runoffs and are invited on the show, where Ingrid can finally meet her "mother."
Quietly charming, with a dash of romance.
Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
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Mar 2, 2011
The center of winter - Marya Hornbacher
Summary: In the aftermath of her husband's devastating suicide, Claire Schiller moves with their two young children into the home of her in-laws during an oppressive Minnesota winter and shares unexpected moments of comfort, healing, and humor. A first novel. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ In northern Minnesota the winters seem to go on forever: bleak, gray, and everlasting. Dismal enough to drive a man to drink or despair, or both. So when, in the midst of this gloom, Arthur Schiller takes a gun to his head, he puts an end to his sorrow over his unhappy marriage, his mentally ill son, and failures real or imagined. His wife, Claire, had just told Arnold that she was going to leave him, and naturally blames herself for his death. His 12-year-old son, Esau, recently committed to the state mental hospital, blames himself, too. Even six-year-old Kate somehow feels responsible. In this eloquently evocative portrait of how one family copes with tragedy, Hornbacher limns their mourning with exquisite sensitivity and gentle humor. With precocious Kate as the heart of the novel, fragile Esau as its conscience, Hornbacher has created characters who are genuine, engaging, and unforgettable. Following her brutally honest memoir, the acclaimed Wasted (1998), with this stunning debut novel, Hornbacher, who inevitably will be compared to Alice Sebold, proves herself to be a master storyteller. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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Oct 1, 2010
The year of magical thinking - Joan Didion
Summary: An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Didion--a master essayist, great American novelist, and astute political observer--uses autobiography as a vehicle for tonic inquiries into both the self and society. In Where I Was From (2003), she meshed family history with an examination of America's romance with the West. Here, in her most personal and generous book to date, she chronicles a year of grief with her signature blend of intellectual rigor and deep feeling. The ordeal began on Christmas 2003 when Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, learn that their daughter, Quintana Roo, is in intensive care with severe pneumonia and septic shock. Five grim days later, Dunne and Didion come home from the hospital, sit down to dinner, and Dunne suffers "a sudden massive coronary event" and dies. Married for 40 years and sharing a passion for literature, they were inordinately close. But Didion could not give herself over to grief: Quintana's health went from bad to worse as she developed a life-threatening hematoma on her brain. She survived, and Didion had the wherewithal to cope: "In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go the literature. Information was control." So she researches grief, schools herself in her daughter's medical conditions, and monitors the flux of flashbacks and fears that strobe through her mind. Didion describes with compelling precision exactly how grief feels, and how it impairs rational thought and triggers "magical thinking." The result is a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief, matched by a penetrating tribute to marriage, motherhood, and love. ((Reviewed August 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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Aug 3, 2010
Sing them home - Stephanie Kallos
Sing them home - Kallos, Stephanie
Summary: Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives.
Booklist Reviews
Things are swept away by tornados in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska: pianos, houses, and a young girl and her mother. Although the young girl, Bonnie Jones, is eventually recovered, her mother, Aneira Hope Jones, never resurfaces. The painful circumstances surrounding their mother s death leave the Jones children, Larken, Gaelen, and Bonnie (henceforth christened Flying Girl), emotionally stunted and struggling to learn how to love. Years later, when another natural disaster draws them together, the three are confronted by the clouded past that has haunted them since childhood. In multiple ways, it is the community members of Emlyn Springs who teach these motherless children how to love again. Sing Them Home ushers us into small-town life, with all its distinctive cultural nuances, eccentric personalities, and homegrown secrets. With the same beauty and lyricism of her first novel, Broken for You (2004), Kallos stitches together a colorful patchwork of memories and images, creating a rich narrative fabric that develops and changes as it passes through each character s hands. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.
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Jan 4, 2010
Making toast - Roger Rosenblatt
Summary: Describes how, after their adult daughter's sudden death, the author and his wife moved in with their son-in-law and three grandchildren, quickly becoming reaccustomed to the world of small children and helping the family grieve and get on with life. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
When their daughter, Amy, died, Rosenblatt and his wife virtually moved in with their son-in-law and three grandchildren, all trying valiantly to cope with the death of a loving young woman and doctor felled by an asymptomatic heart condition. The Rosenblatts plunged themselves into the lives of Harris, six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, shopping, cooking, shuttling, and tending to broken hearts, including their own. Essayist, author, and playwright Rosenblatt, as grandfather Boppo, is tender and amusing as he recalls simple moments in the life of his daughter. His wife, Ginny, a former schoolteacher, essentially leads Amy's life in her absence, congregating with the mothers at the children's school activities and outings. Blindsided by Amy's death, they are all fragile in their concerns for other family members; tardiness or a choking fit become occasions for worry. Friends who have lost children commiserate on the unbearable loss. Sensitive without being sentimental, Rosenblatt eases any potential discomfort on the reader's part at this invitation to view one family's efforts to cope with loss. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews
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