Count The Ways by Joyce Maynard

 

My thoughts

I can't recommend this book enough. It's one of those that makes you have all the feels. Hope, laughter, happiness, deep sadness, and more. It's about a family. 

Told from the mother's voice throughout. This story will touch your heart. What goes on in this family is so normal yet so inspiring too. Sad but uplifting. They are a dysfunctional but loving family. A force in many ways. Though not always so good or happy they are strong. Even through diversity they prevail. 

Eleanor and Cam fall in love quickly. They marry quickly and start a family quickly. Though they do live a pretty laid back life. They have three children: Alison the oldest. Ursula the middle. Toby the baby and only boy. They are taught to be good children and they are for the most part. Alison has a few things going on that will be addressed. Ursula is the one that tries to keep everyone at peace. Toby is the wild child. 

This family will go through a lot together. Then something horrific happens and things are just never the same. 

There is a divorce. A new marriage. A child who identifies differently than when born. A child who is suffering brain damage. And the one that tries hard to help. There is a lot of blaming too. Lack of forgiveness that in many ways I do understand. That would be hard. But they do move on. Grow up. Have lives. And the forgiveness comes.

This book had me crying so hard in parts and laughing in other parts. You'll need tissues for sure.

I'll be starting the next book now. I'm sure it's going to be a tear jerker of a story also. 

Grab this one and a box or two of tissues and settle in. This author did a fantastic job with this novel. It's not only great but it's beautifully written. Keeps you turning the pages. Keeps you wanting more even when this one ends. Make sure you have How The Light Gets in so you can continue. 

About

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard takes on the story of a family from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and its costly aftermath—to illuminate how the mistakes of parents are passed down through generations to fester, or to be healed. 

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.