Product Description
A new voice in the tradition of Anne Tyler and Anita Shreve

Christmas Eve 1967: the night the lives of the McDonald children, Deborah, Robert, James, and Meredith, changed forever. Th eir mother, Rosemarie, told them she was running out to buy more lights for the tree. Instead, she boarded a plane bound for London, leaving the children with their father and the gnawing question: Why did their mother abandon them?

Over the years the siblings have become practiced in concealing their pain, remaining close into adulthood and forming their own families. But long-closed wounds are reopened and secrets that each sibling has locked away come to light, as their father progresses into dementia and James encounters Rosemarie after nearly forty years of her absence. Veitch’s family portrait reveals the joys and sorrows, the complexity and ambiguity of family life, and poignantly probes what it means to love and what it means to leave.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 21 reviews)

Disappointing

I had a hard time with this book for the most part. I kept waiting for the moment where we would see the good in the mother and have empathy for her and it never came. The part at the end when she was getting a little annoyed by her kids again bothered me. I just never really felt that she felt sorry for her actions. And I didn't really find the story that believable. I understand James was the "easygoing one" but it seemed like he was almost too forgiving. I just don't think the kids should have jumped back to having their mother the way they did, it seemed like the book was missing something there. They should have been a little more conflicted. A few emails, and all is good with everyone? That's not really real life. I also could not empathize with Deborah either and found her character for the most part, well, annoying. Having said that, I really liked Olivia and one of the main reasons I stuck through the book was to see what developed with her. Robert and Meredith were decent characters too that I rooted for. I also wished we could have seen a little more what the abandonment did to the father Alex. I understand we were focusing on his dementia, however, it would have been good to explore what her leaving really did to him too.
I guess I was intrigued by the story line and that is why I bought the book, but I was not able to empathize with this mother and I thought that's what the reader would finally see: That this women made a terrible mistake-but I mean....she didn't even want to be called Mommy? To me she just continued to be a selfish person who never really wanted to be a mother to the very end of the book.
September 09, 2008

Quick read, good family drama, but frustrating

*SPOILER ALERT* I couldn't put this book down, having found the dialogue and plot so intriguing. While I didn't like most of the characters, I still felt obliged to look deeper. Deborah was particularly fascinating for her bitterness, her own clear lack of a mothering instinct (seems she had had enough mothering by default in her younger years), her attraction to feminism, and perhaps the most shocking outcome in my opinion - that *she* ended up the family villian for a time when Rose re-entered the picture. In fact, that's the key point that I found most frustrating - the kids' ultimate acceptance of Rose and Alex's complete lack of recall of his wife's abandonment meant Rose essentially "got away with it," despite the wreckage she left behind over the decades. But I still find myself wondering, what baggage would the kids be holding had their depressed, outward-looking, dissatisfied mother stuck around? How much better or worse would it have been for each family member?
August 30, 2008

A disappointing read....

The author did absolutely nothing to develop these characters and give them any depth. And she used one of the worst hack writer vehicles: wrapping every character's life up with a nice happy bow in the last chapter.
August 25, 2008

SUPERB!

A page-turner! Looking forward to a sequel! Complex characters we can all relate to. Impressive for a first-time novelist.
August 11, 2008

Couldn't get into this book

After the first scene where the Mom leaves, this book goes downhill.
I couldn't get into the story or the characters.
July 31, 2008

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