A Very Good Read

Oh dear I cried and cried through this book. 

An author I hadn't read before and I'll read another by her.

When Ellen  visits home for her father's birthday, her planned life path changes.  

Essentially this book is about how relationships change within a family, when one member becomes ill and is need of care. The novel's greatest strength is in its characterisation.  Ellen is a successful young New York journalist, so different from her homebound mother, the wife of small town English Literature Professor. 

She is called upon to take care of Kate, her mother, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, she is driven to abandon her chosen life path and confronted with caring for her mother, running a house and she sees first hand, the unequal partnership that is her parent's marriage and with mortality itself.

We learn right at the beginning of the book that Ellen is being questioned about her mother's death and is suspected of 'a mercy killing.'

With the inevitable death of her mother, Ellen comes to realise something she hadn't acknowledged previously in her life, and she changes into a person with a heart. The one true thing was 'love.'

I can't express how moved I was by this book, I was entranced from page one and raced through it. 

What I thought was a sadness for Ellen, was that her successful father wasn't the man she thought he was, and that her mother who was 'only a home bound wife,' was the strong one, the one, with whom she never really identified.

A touching portrayal of a mother and daughter's relationship which will not leave you unmoved. I loved it.

Chrisxx