Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard – 464 pages
Book Blurb:
After falling in love in the last years of the 1970s, Eleanor and Cam follow their dream of raising three children on a New Hampshire farm. Theirs is a seemingly idyllic life of summer softball games and Labor Day cookouts, snow days and skating on the pond. But when a tragic accident permanently injures the family’s youngest child, Eleanor blames Cam. Her inability to forgive him leads to a devastating betrayal: an affair with the family babysitter that brings about the end of their marriage.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family—and the many others who make up their world—make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. As we follow the family from the days of illegal abortion and the draft through the early computer age, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS epidemic, the early awakenings of the #MeToo era, and beyond? Through the gender transition of one of the children and another’s choice to cease communication with her mother? We witness a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in the face of unanticipated disaster.
My Review: 5 stars
Count the Ways took my breath away with its simplistic, yet devastatingly beautiful descriptions of marriage and motherhood. Eleanor is our main protagonist with three children whose vastly different personalities test her, enchant her and at times, destroy her.
The story captures the early, simple love between Eleanor and Cam, and goes through several decades in which time the author explores themes of mistakes made, the painful gift of forgiveness, divorce, community, friendship, and the importance of home. As the years go by Maynard drops so many musical references of the different time periods such as Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, and Simon & Garfunkel, to name of few. I hadn’t thought of Tea for the Tillerman album in eons!! Also peppered in were important newsworthy moments that easily transported me to where I was working or what I was doing during the AIDS crisis, the Challenger explosion and the deaths of Princess Diana and Michael Jackson.
My review can’t do this book justice, it’s just a read and enjoy. It’s long but reads so keenly and simply that it flies by. Maynard has created the book she was meant to write and that says a lot considering how many books she has under her belt. Full of emotion, circumstance and reality, you’ll want to buy this for your best friend to discuss it.
Quotes I liked:
How does it happen that a person with whom you have shared your most intimate moments—greatest love, greatest pain, joy, also grief—can become a stranger?”
“This was the terrible part of being a parent. The more you loved, the more you had to lose. It might as well be your own heart the pitcher was firing off toward the plate, hovering out in midair, ready for some bat to smash into it. Once you had a child you were never safe again.”
“Sometimes you leave a place because you don’t like being there. Sometimes you have to leave because you love it too much.”
“Why did people think having a tidy home, or a quiet one, was such a great thing? To Eleanor, the sound of her family’s voices was music.”
“When a person gave less, he required less in return.”
“Children of divorced parents were like citizens of two hostile countries, observing the laws and customs of each, depending on where they were at the moment.”
“Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall-the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it.”
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