Thank You for All Things
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
At twelve, Lucy Marie McGowan already knows she’ll be a psychologist when she grows up. And her quirky and conflicted family provides plenty of opportunity for her to practice her calling. Now Lucy, her “profoundly gifted” twin brother, Milo, her commitment-phobic mother, and her New Age grandmother are leaving Chicago for Timber Falls, Wisconsin, to care for her dying grandfather—a complex and difficult man whose failure as a husband and father still painfully echoes down through the years.
Lucy believes her time in the rural town where the McGowan story began will provide a key piece to the puzzle of her family’s broken past, and perhaps even reveal the truth about her own missing father. But what she discovers is so much more—a lesson about the paradoxes of love and the grace of forgiveness that the adults around her will need help in remembering if their family is ever to find peace and embrace the future.
By turns heart-wrenching and heart-mending, Thank You for All Things is a powerful and poignant novel by a brilliant storyteller who illustrates that when it comes to matters of family and love, often it is the innocent who force others to confront their darkest secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her new novel, Kring (The Book of Bright Ideas) crafts a beautiful, witty story that rings with heartbreak, hope and laughter. Lucy McGowan is a 12-year-old genius with a photographic memory, an even more brilliant brother, Milo (IQ: 180), and a single mother, Tess, living in Chicago. What Lucy has that her brother doesn't is curiosity and "people smarts," a quality that propels her to unearth the hidden relationships and buried secrets of her family. An imaginative and headstrong girl, Lucy finds herself on a grim family visit to her sickly, estranged grandfather in Timber Falls, Wis. Witnessing her mom's unshakable hatred for her dying father, Lucy begins to investigate her family's past; her love for the sick old patriarch she knows is challenged repeatedly by what she finds out about the angry, abusive man he used to be. Kring's brilliance lies in her powerful reversals and revelations, taking readers and characters on a dramatic, emotional roller coaster.
