It is about parenting, motherhood in particular, and about treading the fine line between codling your offspring for life and giving them the freedom they need to grow. Though a character flawed in many ways, there is little chance of not identifying with and rooting for Mary Beth and the same goes for her family, because if you take away all the stuff around the edges, this book is about just that: family and the complex relationships that bind its members. The writing draws you in like honey attracts flies, and keeps hold of you in just the same way. If we'd not been travelling this week I could have devoured it in a day. I was lost in it from the first chapter and went from reluctantly putting it down to having to have it prised from my hands towards the end. Instead, it is a substantial, chewy, sink-your-teeth in story that starts off so ordinary and ends up so, well, extraordinary. This is not a flitty piece of chick lit (though I don't mean that in a derogatory way as I enjoy that genre). The image on the front of the paperback edition says it all: a broken snow globe with a house inside, the shattered glass giving you an idea of the magnitude of the troubles that will shatter Mary Beth's own life. By the end of the book more than one thing in that sentence has changed, and for Mary Beth life is barely recognisable as the predictable if slightly mundane passage of time it once was.

Would things be better if life were more exciting, varied, newsworthy? Is that a legitimate thing to hope for? They say to be careful what you wish for, and Mary Beth never comes right out and says this is what she wants, but there are hints to this effect.Īs we first get to know her she is a mother of three and a wife of one, who fills her days landscaping other people's gardens and decorating the Christmas trees of those too busy or lazy to do it themselves. Mary Beth Latham is contemplating her average, ordinary life where every day is more of less the same.

Every last one anna quindlen summary