3/8/14

Book of the Week #10

Hello Goodbye by Emily Chenoweth (NY: Random House, 2009)

"... into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen."         --Jane Kenyon

Chenoweth, who lives in Oregon, begins her novel with this epigraph from a New Hampshire poet and sets her story at a resort hotel in the White Mountains.

"In the summer after her freshman year of college, Abby Hansen embarks on what might be a final vacation with her parents to a historic resort in northern New Hampshire. The Presidential Hotel, with its stately rooms and old-fashioned dress code, seems almost unbearably stuffy to Abby, but the young, free-spirited hotel staff offers her the chance for new friendships, and maybe even romance.
However, for her parents, Elliott and Helen, their time spent together in the shadow of the White Mountains has taken on a deeper meaning. By inviting family friends to join them, they open their marriage up to a lifetime of confessions, and they must confront a secret about Helen's health that they have been hiding from their daughter.
Heartbreaking and luminous, Hello Goodbye deftly explores a family's struggle with love and loss, as a summer vacation becomes an occasion for awakening" --Publisher's blurb

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