Blessings
A Novel
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4.2 • 186 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A well-told story of love and redemption” (The Washington Post Book World) from the bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs
“A polished gem of a novel . . . lovingly crafted, beautifully written.”—The Miami Herald
Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard house on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work at Blessings are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him. Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present, what makes a person or a life legitimate or illegitimate and who decides, and the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community.
Blessings is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Venturing into fictional territory far from the blue-collar neighborhoods of Black and Blue and other works, Quindlen's immensely appealing new novel is a study in social contrasts and of characters whose differences are redeemed by the transformative power of love. The eponymous Blessings is a stately house now gone to seed, inhabited by Mrs. Blessing, an 80-year-old wealthy semirecluse with an acerbic tongue and a reputation for hanging on to every nickel. Widowed during WWII, Lydia Blessing was banished to her socially prominent family's country estate for reasons that are revealed only gradually. Austere, unbending and joyless, Lydia has no idea, when she hires young Skip Cuddy as her handyman, how her life and his are about to change. Skip had promise once, but bad companions and an absence of parental guidance have led to a stint in the county jail. When Skip stumbles upon a newborn baby girl who's been abandoned at Blessings, he suddenly has a purpose in life. With tender devotion, he cares secretly for the baby for four months, in the process forming a bond with Mrs. Blessing, who discovers and admires his clandestine parenting skills. A double betrayal destroys their idyll. As usual, Quindlen's fine-tuned ear for the class distinctions of speech results in convincing dialogue. Evoking a bygone patrician world, she endows Blessings with an almost magical aura. While it skirts sentimentality by a hairbreadth, the narrative is old-fashioned in a positive way, telling a dramatic story through characters who develop and change, and testifying to the triumph of human decency when love is permitted to grow and flourish.
Customer Reviews
Blessings Secrets
I loved the read. Anna Quindlen you pulled me in and the pages kept turning. Sad and bittersweet with happy moments intertwined and some surprises that bring some soothing salve.
Blessings
Book was interesting but a little confusing as it jumped from past to present. Didn't enjoy it that much.
This book could’ve been so much more.
The ending was incredibly unsatisfying. I kept waiting for the story to lead somewhere, but it just kept getting bogged down in the meanderings of Mrs. Blessings’ mind back into her muddy and disoriented past. And all I wanted to read about was Skip and the baby. I feel like I wasted my time reading hundreds of pages, waiting for the turnaround which would give me a satisfying ending. But it never came, it just kind of disintegrated.