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Bezig met laden... Welcome Home, Stranger: A Noveldoor Kate Christensen
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.   ) Dianekeenoy | Feb 8, 2024 |   ) shazjhb | Jan 24, 2024 | She plans to do what needs to be done and then return to Washington DC and her journalism career with her sanity and dignity intact. Of course that doesn't happen. This novel is about the pleasures and impossibility of going home in middle age, especially when your adult life has been defined in being as far from that place as possible. Rachel and her sister had a difficult childhood, their widowed mother hard at work staying young and wild, money always being short. And her relationship with her sister fractured for reasons Rachel doesn't know. Returning is hard, and when it turns out that she may be staying awhile, her ability to justify her own decisions and actions become less tenable by the day. Christensen writes well and it's unusual to find menopause handled as more than a complaint or a punchline. Rachel may be fifty, but she's a Pulitzer-winning journalist and her high school boyfriend keeps turning up like a recurring heat rash. She's an aging woman who is still an active participant in her own life. She manages to hide her own responsibility behind the language of therapy and her judgements of others change depending on her last encounter with them. She's far too complex to be an entirely sympathetic character, but the way she keeps trying to figure things out is always interesting. ( ) RidgewayGirl | Dec 29, 2023 | ) bookworm12 | Dec 28, 2023 | Rachel Callowy, an environmental journalist in Washington, DC, and self-professed “middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic,” is going home to Maine after the death of her mother. Lucie was a very difficult mother, to put it mildly, and Rachel was estranged from her for the last ten years. Her wealthy sister Celeste was left to care for Lucie through cancer treatments. Celeste is upset and angry at Rachel and this presents itself as a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. While Rachel is already handling living with an ex-husband and his boyfriend in their condo, and a boss who wants to fire her, now she has a pile of other problems. A longtime friend/lover, David, lives next door to Celeste with his new wife, but he still wants Rachel. She inherited her mother's house which needs work. Celeste has issues of her own she is dealing with, an alcoholic husband, distant teens, and loads of resentment. Characters are portrayed as realistic individuals. Rachel is fully realized and complex as is Celeste. Lucie is examined and exposed as an especially flawed character. A novel only handling the complicated and unhealthy parenting of Lucie and the effects on her daughters would be a heavy enough focus for a short narrative. Welcome Home, Stranger is a beautifully written novel about the complications of family, grief, growing older, and reexamining your past. However, it also covers so many emotionally laden topics in so few pages that nothing seems to reach any satisfying resolution, which is unfortunate. Just a few of Rachel's problems would be enough to cover in one abbreviated novel. The other option would be to extend the narrative and fully cover all the issues. Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins via Edelweiss. http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2023/11/welcome-home-stranger.html (  ) SheTreadsSoftly | Nov 28, 2023 | geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: "Kate Christensen's new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?"—Richard Russo, author of Somebody's Fool "To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensen's superb new novel Welcome Home, Stranger, a triumph of intelligence and wit (which will surprise none of her many fans). The prodigal here is a brilliant journalist grieving the loss of a very difficult mother while attempting peace with those she left behind: a resentful sister and an ex-lover who can be neither trusted nor forgotten. A spellbinding book from one of our best chroniclers of the very American struggle to strive for excellence while still living in community with others."—Ann Packer, author of The Children's Crusade "A deeply endearing story about confronting one's past and constructing a new future—under extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I've read all year."—Washington Post[ From the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a novel about grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes home—reluctantly—to Maine after the death of her mother. Can you ever truly go home again? An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she's a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she's summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother's death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters—an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister's best friend–Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is. Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now. .].Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999WaarderingGemiddelde: (3.69)
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