How the Light Gets In
A Novel
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4.2 • 75 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard comes the eagerly anticipated follow-up to her beloved novel Count the Ways—a complex story of three generations of a family and its remarkable, resilient, indomitable matriarch, Eleanor.
Following the death of her former husband, Cam, fifty-four-year-old Eleanor has moved back to the New Hampshire farm where they raised three children to care for their brain-injured son, Toby, now an adult. Toby’s older brother, Al, is married and living in Seattle with his wife; their sister, Ursula, lives in Vermont with her husband and two children. Although all appears stable, old resentments, anger, and bitterness simmer just beneath the surface.
How the Light Gets In follows Eleanor and her family through fifteen years (2010 to 2024) as their story plays out against a uniquely American backdrop and the events that transform their world (climate change, the January 6th insurrection, school violence) and shape their lives (later-life love, parental alienation, steadfast friendship). With her trademark sensitivity and insight, Joyce Maynard paints an indelible portrait of characters both familiar and new making their way over rough, messy, and treacherous terrain to find their way to what is, for each, a place to call “home.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maynard continues the story of Eleanor, the resilient New Hampshire matriarch featured in 2020's Count the Ways, with this heartwarming chronicle of a woman coping with changes in her life and in the country. Eleanor is estranged from her 30-something daughter, Ursula, who blames her mother for the breakup of their once tight-knit family, though it was Cam, Eleanor's ex-husband, who left her for their babysitter, Coco. Eleanor's son, Toby, who sustained brain damage in a childhood accident, tends goats on Eleanor's farm and is generally well-liked by their neighbors, but after Donald Trump enters the presidential race in 2016, Eleanor senses a new mean-spiritedness around town, which she blames in part for Coco wrongly accusing Toby of molesting children. After Ursula develops long Covid, Eleanor takes care of her two children, who are in high school and middle school. Later, Eleanor finds romance with a climate activist, her first serious relationship with a man for many years, and she considers how much she's sacrificed over the years by putting her family first. Maynard's punchy chapters highlight pivotal moments in her characters' lives, and she holds readers' interest by showing how their relationships evolve. The author's fans will be pleased.
Customer Reviews
A story for all of us
I loved this story-it was filled with beautiful moments and hard realities and everything in between. It is a story about family and a woman and how life forms them both. Highly recommend!
Too much
I wanted to get into the story and characters in this book, but the overt inclusion of every single hot button/ political topic you can think of made it impossible. It felt more like a left wing educational agenda than a story. I actually found myself rolling my eyes at times thinking, “enough already, I GET it”!
I admit, at about 2/3 of the way through, I had to just skim through the rest to see what happened to the characters at the end.
How the Light Gets in…
was really enjoying these characters and story and writing when it turned to political diatribe against 45th president and his supporters.
Terrible disappointment: I resent using fiction/literature
to insult and demean.