Meet Mary Beth Latham. She’s in her mid-40′s, She has a good husband owns an insurance business, treats her right, and is a good father. She has her own landscaping business that keeps her busy during the days. Mary Beth has 3 kids. Ruby, the oldest, is seventeen, and is a strong-willed free-spirit who loves poetry and shops in thrift stores. Then there are the teenage twins, Max and Alex, who couldn’t be more different. Alex is the star athlete, popular with the kids at school; Max is the loner, long-haired and brooding, who likes to play drums and wallow in depression. And then there is Kiernan, the long-time family friend who also happens to be Ruby’s puppy-dog of a boyfriend.
All in all, its a good life, but Mary Beth is starting to get a little lonely in her marriage, and a little more worried about her children, and a little sad that they are growing up so fast.
Mary Beth is the narrator of Every Last One, by Anna Quindlen.
Her story devides into two parts: Before and After. Before and After what, you ask? Well, I can’t tell you that, because it would give everything away, but suffice it to say, this family experiences something horrible. The first half of the book is about the set-up — learning about the Lathams, getting close to them. Then comes the horrible thing. The second half of the book is about picking up the pieces, about how to move forward when you are convinced you can’t.
Every Last One is a quick read. Quindlen is a seasoned novelist who knows how to develop characters and how to tell a story. Her background is as a writer for the New York Times, and, as a result, her writing has a strong sense of realism. She writes conversations between parents and children that sound like how parents and kids communicate in the real world. The Lathams seem real. Which makes the ordeal they go through even harder to take as a reader.
It’s an easy read, and I recommend it to those of you who like family-based dramas. If you are a soccer mom (which I am clearly not), or just a mom with teenagers, you’ll probably relate to the book more than I did. Let me know what you think.
[...] a father is hard. Just like being a soccer mom is hard. Just ask the dads in these books I recently [...]