The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett by Annie Lyons

The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett by Annie Lyons

372 pages

Published September 2020 by William Morrow

Publisher's Summary: 

It's never too late to start living.

Eudora Honeysett is done with this noisy, moronic world--all of it. She has witnessed the indignities and suffering of old age and has lived a full life. At eighty-five, she isn't going to leave things to chance. Her end will be on her terms. With one call to a clinic in Switzerland, a plan is set in motion.

Then she meets ten-year-old Rose Trewidney, a whirling, pint-sized rainbow of sparkling cheer. All Eudora wants is to be left alone to set her affairs in order. Instead, she finds herself embarking on a series of adventures with the irrepressible Rose and their affable neighbor, the recently widowed Stanley--afternoon tea, shopping sprees, trips to the beach, birthday celebrations, pizza parties.

While the trio of unlikely BFFs grow closer and anxiously await the arrival of Rose's new baby sister, Eudora is reminded of her own childhood--of losing her father during World War II and the devastating impact it had on her entire family. In reflecting on her past, Eudora realizes she must come to terms with what lies ahead.

But now that her joy for life has been rekindled, how can she possibly say goodbye?

My Thoughts: 

When I saw I'm on a roll reading about older ladies with attitude, this is my latest example (following Three Days In June, The Little Village of Book Lovers, Remarkably Bright Creatures, and The Life Impossible). My sister recommended it to me but when I first picked it up, I was afraid it was too soon after my last book about a cranky old woman. But I needed to get books back to the library so I picked it up again and soon was drawn in to Eudora's story. 

Eudora is the reason the saying "You never know what someone is going through, so be kind." She has very little patience for people any longer and even less time for them. She's getting older and slower and has no family. She's ready for life to be done and she's desperate to go out on her own terms. There's a part of me that never stopped believing she was right to feel that way, especially when she expected to be all alone at the end. 

But Rose didn't see Eudora as an old woman whose time was about over. She understood that Eudora was old, but it never occurred to her that Eudora wouldn't be around for her as long as she needed her. I felt the same way about my mom so I could certainly understand how a ten-year-old would feel that way. Rose saw in Eudora someone who could be a friend and ally. But Eudora hadn't had a friend in a very long time, nor family or love in almost as long and she certainly wasn't looking for any of those things when Rose first showed up on her door. But Annie Lyons wants readers to understand that friends can be any age and family can be the people we choose to care about. 

Eudora had been hurt a lot in her life and disappointed by so many people. It was hard for her not to expect that from her new friends and even harder to believe that those people would be there for her until the end. So she never gave up on her desire to go to Switzerland and end her life on her own terms. And I came to believe that was exactly how this book would end, that having developed those friendships and that makeshift family, Eudora could do what she wanted to do without regret. 

The night before I finished this book, it had gotten late. I had only about ten pages left to read but I had to get to sleep. So I finished this one while I had my morning coffee. Big mistake. Those of you who have been around for a long time will know that while a lot of books have really impacted me emotionally, few have made me cry. This one did. It's the kind of ending that is both sad and uplifting. And now I have to read something completely different because I want to let this one sit with me for a while. 

After Annie by Anna Quindlen

After Annie by Anna Quindlen

304 pages

Published Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

When Annie Brown dies suddenly, her husband, her children, and her closest friend are left to find a way forward without the woman who has been the lynchpin of all their lives. Bill is overwhelmed without his beloved wife, and Annemarie wrestles with the bad habits her best friend had helped her overcome. And Ali, the eldest of Annie’s children, has to grow up overnight, to care for her younger brothers and even her father and to puzzle out for herself many of the mysteries of adult life. 

Over the course of the next year what saves them all is Annie, ever-present in their minds, loving but not sentimental, caring but nobody’s fool, a voice in their heads that is funny and sharp and remarkably clear. The power she has given to those who loved her is the power to go on without her. The lesson they learn is that no one beloved is ever truly gone. 

Written in Quindlen’s emotionally resonant voice and with her deep and generous understanding of people, After Annie is about hope, and about the unexpected power of adversity to change us in profound and indelible ways.

My Thoughts: 

Quindlen is one of my favorite authors; even when I don't love one of her books, I still find plenty to like and think about it. So when I find that she's written a new book, I jump at the chance to read it. Without even looking to see what it's about. And, clearly, without paying much attention to the title. So it came as a surprise to me when Annie drops to the kitchen floor, dead of an aneurysm. I suppose I thought that this would be a family story, which it most certainly is. But it is primarily a book about grief and loss and how each person handles both in their own way and in their own time. 

Quindlen is a master of making big themes feel intimate, personal, and real. 

"Annie Brown died right before dinner. The mashed potatoes were still in the pot on the stove, the dented pot with the loose handle, but the meatloaf and the peas were already on the table. Two of the children were in their usual seats. Jamie tried to pick a piece of bacon off the top of the meatloaf, and Ali elbowed him."

 It turns out that Annie was everyone's anchor, as women so often are. Without his anchor, Bill looks to other people, who are all too willing to step up, to help him survive. Ali turns to her only real friend, only to find that her friend doesn't have the capacity to help. Ant rebels. Annemarie finds she doesn't know how to fight her addiction without Annie holding her accountable. Fortunately, there are people who offer real solace and reasons to fight hard to make a new life, while still honoring the person they lost. 

For a short novel, Quindlen has packed a lot into this one. Not only are we dealing with death, grief, loss, parenting, marriage, and friendship, Quindlen is also addressing mental health, sexual assault, addiction, aging, and secrets. In lesser hands, it would be too much. It might be more here than Quindlen needed to include here; but, because she handles it all so well, it mostly worked for me. And I was so wrapped up in the characters, so invested in their finding their way to peace, that I was willing to overlook anything that might have been hard to forgive in a lesser work. I know there will be people who are not happy with the ending; but I was fine with it because I so badly wanted to this family to pull together and find a way forward. 

 

Grief Is Love by Marisa Renee Lee

Grief Is Love by Marisa Renee Lee

Published April 2022 by Grand Central Publishing

192 pages

Publisher's Summary:

 In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one—healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires. 

In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like. In this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more. 

The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core, Grief is Love explores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we’ve lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.

My Thoughts: 

I caught just a bit of Glennon Doyle speaking with Marisa Renee Lee about her grief experience and this book and knew immediately that I needed to buy a copy for my sister...and then decided that I needed to read it as well. So I checked it out from the library so that not only could we both read it, but we could read it together.

Is it good, you might be asking. Well, let's just start by saying that I haven't put this many sticky notes into a book in a very long time, especially a book this short. 

"Our culture glorifies the idea of just sucking is up, moving on, and being tough. This is part of what makes living with loss challenging."

Which is part of the reason employers give so little bereavement leave. I got three days when my mom died. Three days. Three days were gone before we even got to the day of the funeral. After five days I returned to work. I'd been so busy taking care of my dad and getting things ready for the funeral that I had hardly started to grieve. Afterward, I rarely gave myself permission to grieve. That is one of Lee's primary messages - we must give ourselves permission to grieve, in whatever way that is for us, for the rest of our lives. Because if grief is love, as Lee says it is;  and because we loved our person, we will never entirely stop grieving them. 

Lee talks about the toll grief takes on relationships, gives readers permission to feel joy and laugh and anger even as we experience grief, asks us to give ourselves grace (yeah, that spoke to me, given that "grace" is my word of the year), and tells readers that the death of a loved one should change you, should make you want to live in a way that will be a legacy to your loved one. 

"Joy is a basic right. Don't feel cast aside from your grief; you need to entitle yourself to the joy you deserve. If you are going to live a full life after loss, you have to find your way back to joy." 

"I failed to understand that the death of a loved one, of someone you hold dear, should change you. That is their mark on the world. You are their mark on this world." 

My sister and I have spent a lot of time texting back and forth about different pages in this book; she'll be coming this way soon and I expect that we'll spend a lot to time together talking about it even more. I am certain I will be buying myself a copy of this book to put on my shelf, next to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and Steve Leder's The Beauty of What Remains. I would recommend it to anyone dealing with grief, especially those who are preparing for grief as a loved one is dying or black women (Lee, as a black woman, speaks eloquently about the ways being a black woman makes grief even more difficult to navigate). 

The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder

The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift by Steve Leder

Published January 2021 by Penguin Publishing Group

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains. 

This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before. 

Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined.

My Thoughts: 

Ti, of Book Chatter, read this book for her book club and struggled to make herself pick it up to read a book about grief and dying. I'm so glad she did and that she recommended it to me. It was exactly the book I needed to help me with the grief of losing my mom. Like Ti, this one will be one of my favorite books of the year. I read this book only at home - it was inevitable that I was going to cry while I read it. 

Steve Leder may have spent his life as a rabbi, spending much of his time communicating with people. But putting that ability on paper doesn't always work. Leder, it turns out, is excellent at making readers feel exactly what I imagine those he tends to feel. Comfort, warmth, wisdom, humor, compassion. 

Much of the book is Leder's reflections on what he has learned from spending time with those who are dying, particularly people with whom he has been close. He wants readers to understand that the dying are not afraid. His other lessons for the family of the dying include: 

"Do not waste the rest of your loved one's life worrying about his or her death. Treat the person you love like the fully alive, fully human, fully beautiful person he or she is. Enjoy him or her for every good moment of every hour of every day. Assume your loved one can hear absolutely everything you are saying in his or her presence. She is alive, treat her that way. He is alive, treat him that way. 

Give an Academy award-winning performance despite your fears. The fears that dying people express to me at the end of their lives are fears about whether or not the people they love will be okay. Even if you have to pretend a little or a lot, you need to tell that person you love who is dying that you will be okay. [Say] We love you. We will take care of one another. You can rest. You can let go because you have taught us and given us everything we need to be okay when you are gone."

These particular lessons spoke to me. They brought me back to the final 24 hours of my mother-in-law's life. As she lay hours away from death, her family gathered around her bed, taking turns holding her hands, telling her how much we loved her and that she would soon be with her beloved Jack. But I took equal comfort in believing that she could hear the conversations in the room - the stories, the laughter, the comfort we offered each other.

After having sat more than a thousand dying people and their families over the years, Leder thought he knew what grief was but it wasn't until his own father died, after a ten year battle with Alzheimer's disease, that he really understood death and grief personally. Despite the fact that Steve Leder and I have almost nothing in common, this book felt personal for me, too. Again and again, passages felt as though they were written for me. 

While Leder can, of course, draw on his faith and belief in the afterlife to find comfort, I've struggled with that. "It is the impermanence of the body that has convinced me of the eternality of the soul. Physics tells us that energy never dies, it merely assumes a different form." Where faith fails me, the idea that there is a scientific explanation to believe that my mom is still with us is something I can believe in, an explanation for the signs I see, the presence I feel. 

"Grief is surprising. Not at first, when you are prepared for it to pick you up and slam you against the rocky shore, but later, in a month or two or ten. Anyone who think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line does not understand grief." Leder then goes on to recount a time when grief hit him unawares. This man understands, I thought. The other day I let my dad's phone ring through to the answer machine and it was my mother's voice on the message. I almost couldn't leave a message. 

I don't think I'm overstating it when I say that this is an important guide in how to live your life knowing that one day you will leave the Earth, how to prepare for death, how to help someone through it, how to comfort others. I checked it out from the library but I'll be buying a copy to own. A few years ago I would have thought it was odd to feel so strongly about a book about dying and then I read Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, another book I checked out from the library and then bought. Both that one and this one have some of the most important lessons I've ever read. 

Thank you, Ti, for guiding me to this book and the comfort it gave me. 

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult 

Published September 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She's on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband, but a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.

Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, her beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, where she helps ease the transition between life and death for patients in hospice.

But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a job she once studied for, but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.

After the crash landing, the airline ensures the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation wherever they want to go. The obvious option for Dawn is to continue down the path she is on and go home to her family. The other is to return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways--the first known map of the afterlife.

As the story unfolds, Dawn's two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried beside them. Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly asked: What does a life well-lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices...or do our choices make us? And who would you be, if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?

My Thoughts:

You might recall that not long ago I finally read my first Jodi Picoult book. Two things had put me off before that: the snobbish idea that good books cannot be written as fast as Picoult writes books and the idea that her books seem to always be about the latest "big" controversy. I still don't know that you could write the great American novel in a year but Picoult proved to me that you can write a book that will engross and entertain readers that quickly. And that if you can write well about whatever the latest big topic is, then it's good to write about those things in a way that will make people think about them. So we come to this book, which I was eager to read when it was offered to me. It is most decidedly not about the latest talking point. In fact, it is about two of the oldest subjects: love and death. 

Having not long ago read God, Graves, and Scholars, it was interesting for me to find myself back in Egypt, uncovering the mysteries of ancient burials. According to Wikipedia, "The Book of Two Ways is a precursor to the New Kingdom books of the underworld as well as the Book of the Dead, in which descriptions of the routes through the afterlife are a persistent theme. The two ways depicted are the land and water routes, separated by a lake of fire, that lead to Rostau and the abode of Osiris." Taking that as her starting point, Picoult has tied ancient superstitions with physic's theory of a multiverse. As explained by Brian, in the book, the idea is that every action has multiple outcomes and that each of them exists in a different universe. 

Picoult has structured her book so that I was never quite sure where in time I was or if I were reading two possible different outcomes which, instead of finding confusing, I found really intriguing. In her current life, Water/Boston, Dawn is a death doula, wife, and mother; in her past, Land/Egypt, she is a graduate student on the cusp of a major archaeological discovery and passionately in love with a fellow student. In both locations, Picoult spends a lot of time sharing with readers what she has learned about hospice work, quantum physics, and Egyptology. A lot. It was certainly interesting, and Picoult has done an incredible amount of research, but it often distracted from Dawn's story. 

Speaking of Dawn's story: you know the old trope where our two leads hate each other in the beginning and then end up falling in love? Yeah, that's Dawn and Wyatt. Unfortunately, that story's grown old for me and I have a hard time buying the idea that the guy that was a jerk in the beginning turns out to be Mr. Wonderful. Which is a problem here - we have to believe that Wyatt was so incredible that Dawn never fell out of love with him and I never entirely bought that. 

And yet...despite that fact that I felt like Picoult took a couple of story lines too far and that some of the plotting was predictable...I liked this book, to a large extent, I think, because I liked the structure and the idea of wondering what might have happened if. I appreciated that Picoult doesn't make either of the men in Dawn's life less than the other; both have their flaws but plenty of reasons for Dawn to be love them. Which makes the ending of the book unknown to readers and I really liked the way that Picoult left things open in the end. For fans of Picoult, I think you'll enjoy this one. 

In This Ground by Beth Castrodale

In This Ground by Beth Castrodale
Published September 2018 by Garland Press
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher through TLC Book Tours

Publisher's Summary:
Just as his indie-rock band was poised to make it big, Ben Dirjery traded it all in for fatherhood and the stability of a job at Bolster Hill Cemetery. Now closing in on fifty, the former guitarist finds himself divorced and at loose ends, and still haunted by the tragic death of his former band’s lead singer, who is buried, literally, under Ben’s feet. Then Ben’s daughter begins questioning a past he has tried to bury. If he can face her questions, he might finally put to rest his guilt over his bandmate’s death, and bring music back into his life.


My Thoughts:
When I agreed to read and review this book for the tour, it was based on this summary, a summary that almost exclusively focuses on the music aspect of the book. But I missed the shovel on the cover of the book and that is a better clue to what this book is about than the guitar that also appears. Music plays a big part in the book but death, and the way we deal with it, is the real story here.

There's a lot going on in this book: there are multiple music stories at play, Castrodale looks at the ways burials are changing, there are a lot of relationships Castrodale explores, a great deal about mushrooms, there's some mystery, and there's even a side story about death in India. It doesn't all work; there's just too much in too short a book and some of the side stories take away from the main story lines. For a while, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to finish the book; I was having such a hard time settling in to it. It was partly saved by the fact that I bailed on the last book I was to supposed to review by TLC Book Tours. But it was mostly saved by the fact that I started to really want to know what happened to Ben to cause him to give up on music. I started to want to find out how he was going to talk the cemetery board into approving green burials (let's be honest, this is the kind of book that you already know that he'll succeed, it's just a matter or how he's going to make that happen). And I started to care about Ben. I wanted to see if he could come to peace with his past, if he could succeed in his relationships.

Castrodale's history as a newspaper reporter comes into play in the pieces she inserts to introduce each chapter, often pieces that mimic newspaper clippings. I found it an interesting way to add a layer to the book and also to move the story along.

It's not a perfect book but it's an unusual book that makes you care about its characters and I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Castrodale. For more reviews, check out the full tour.

Castrodale's Twitter picture!

Beth Castrodale has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. Her novels include Marion Hatley, a finalist for a Nilsen Prize for a First Novel from Southeast Missouri State University Press (published by Garland Press in 2017), and In This Ground (Garland Press, 2018). Beth’s stories have appeared in such journals as Printer’s Devil Review, The Writing Disorder, and the Mulberry Fork Review. Get a free copy of her novel Gold River when you sign up for her e-newsletter, at http://www.bethcastrodale.com/gold-river/.

Connect with Beth Castrodale on her website, Facebook, and Twitter.