Such Good People
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The Randalls are "the nice family down the street": close-knit, resilient, facing day-to-day conflicts and gradual change, with the shared love and deep understanding that has seen them through the years.
Laura Randall and her professor husband, Trace, are proud of their accomplishments, even as they try to balance their own identities with increasingly independent children and while caring for their aging parents. Their college-age sons, Bart and Philip, see the family as a reassuring touchstone as they begin building their adult lives. And for independent, vivacious, sixteen-year-old Annie, the Randalls' only daughter, the family is both a much-loved support, and an obstacle, as she struggles to discover her own awakening dreams and needs.
Then Annie dies in an unforeseeable accident—and their family’s world is turned upside down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing from her own experience, Hickman, author of the nonfiction Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working through Grief, has written an earnest first novel about how a family copes with the accidental death of a child. The central character is Laura Randall, a full-time housewife who gave up her career as a graphic artist to raise her children. Her husband, Trace, is a kindly, if dry, philosophy professor so consumed by his work that Laura often feels he isn't listening when she recounts her admittedly mundane daily tasks. Their sons, Bart and Philip, are both nice college-age kids. Their youngest child, Annie, is a bright, beautiful and slightly rebellious 16-year-old, who may or may not be having sex with her new boyfriend, but who is definitely tired of her father being so distant and her mother being so prying. When the family goes on summer vacation, Annie is killed in a horseback-riding mishap. The rest of the novel shows Laura and Trace grieving in their different ways (unsurprisingly, she's emotional and he's not). They grow apart and even seek emotional solace--though never sinfully--in the arms of others. This is an example of the novel as a therapeutic tool. The emotions are never false, but they're rarely dramatic, either, and the rather stiff dialogue is spoken by characters who are never more than the sum of their situations.
