Count the Ways
Fiction
William Morrow
July 13, 2021
Hardcover
464
Free from publisher
After falling in love in the last years of the 1970s, Eleanor and Cam follow their dream of raising three children on a New Hampshire farm. Theirs is a seemingly idyllic life of summer softball games and Labor Day cookouts, snow days and skating on the pond. But when a tragic accident permanently injures the family’s youngest child, Eleanor blames Cam. Her inability to forgive him leads to a devastating betrayal: an affair with the family babysitter that brings about the end of their marriage.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family—and the many others who make up their world—make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. As we follow the family from the days of illegal abortion and the draft through the early computer age, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS epidemic, the early awakenings of the #MeToo era, and beyond,through the gender transition of one of the children and another’s choice to cease communication with her mother,we witness a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in the face of unanticipated disaster.
With endearingly flawed characters and a keen eye for detail, Joyce Maynard transforms the territory she knows best—home, family, parenthood, love, and loss—into the stuff of a page-turning thriller. In this achingly beautiful novel, she reminds us how great sorrow and great joy may coexist—and frequently do.
Firstly, stunning cover! I listened to an interview with the author who said she wanted to put the cork people on the cover (you'll get this reference if you read the book). While I get the symbolism, and it probably would relate the cover more with the content, I'm glad she was overruled. This is a favorite book trope of mine, family sagas with dysfunctional aspects aplenty, and goodness that is definitely present here. I absolutely thought the author did an amazing job of depicting the setting for this book, and the characters were really well drawn. I sometimes feel like plot points get thrown into books just to tick off boxes, such as the token gay, the person of color, the (as I like to call it) obligatory romance. I was worried that this might be the case with the oldest daughter's plot line, but I didn't feel that at all, it was one of the best storylines in the book! This story takes you on a ride with your emotions. While ultimately it ends on a hopeful note, you have to go through a lot of sadness and turmoil to get there. The only thing keeping this from a higher rating was my nagging issue with Eleanor. It's hard to put into words without giving away a lot of the plot, but she makes a decision that no matter how many times she tries to justify it to herself, I think her whole life (and that of her family) could have taken a different trajectory if she told the truth. She was a bit of a doormat, which I understand from a character point of view, but one that there is no way I could get on board with. Other than my own feelings being projected onto a fictional character, this book had everything I could hope for in a family saga.
A well written story about hope and forgiveness, loneliness and life choices, this is Maynard at her finest. If you like decade long family sagas, I highly recommend you pick this one up.
