Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg

Fiction

Each year, Laura's family gathers at her parent's place to go to the town fair. It's been a family tradition forever and one that can't be missed. Before she heads there with her husband and two teens, she gets a call from her sister saying that she has something very important to discuss with Laura and their brother. The conversation doesn't get very far before their father has a stroke and heads to the hospital. Laura's sister Caroline can't wait. She has been seeing a therapist and the therapist has recommended she talks to her sibling about what happened in their childhood. Caroline states how her mother never gave her any love and treated her completely different from the other children. When Caroline was supposedly in summer camp, she was actually at a hospital recovering from her mother attacking her with a knife. Laura has a hard time reconciling this with the childhood she remembers.

I got sucked in to this book very quickly. None of the characters are perfect and I was questioning truth along with Laura as she was hearing Caroline's story. There's also guilt of not believing a victim's story. Oddly enough, most of the male characters in this book were pretty much absent from the story because they couldn't handle the discussion, which I found a bit odd. I was a bit disappointed at the ending but still not a bad read.

First Line: "It is a photograph of a staircase that I took with my Brownie camera over forty years ago."

Rating:
(4.5/5)

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