Count the Ways
A Novel
-
-
4.3 • 9 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives
Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.
Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.
A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maynard (Under the Influence) shows her mastery at pulling the heartstrings in her latest family saga. Doled out in 100 bite-size chapters, the life of a woman named Eleanor unfolds over five decades starting with her solitary childhood in Newton, Mass., where she felt like an intrusion on her narcissistic, often inebriated parents, whose drunken behavior of shouting matches and thrown glasses Eleanor characterizes as trips to "Crazyland." The author reports on Eleanor's lonely teen years and fragile emotional state that was exacerbated by her parents' deaths in a car accident, and later her financial independence after she sells a children's book series. Other milestones—buying a ramshackle house in New Hampshire, meeting the love of her life, and having three children—give way to the dissolution of her marriage after their four-year-old son almost drowns while being unsupervised. Granted, the many side plots start to feel contrived once they're added up (a minor character's death from AIDS, another's dementia, a #MeToo scenario, and a close friend's refusal to leave an abusive husband, to name a few), but Maynard does a good job of developing Eleanor, making the perspective she gains over the course of her life feel fully earned. Despite the melodrama, Maynard succeeds at pulling in the reader.
