Review by Booklist Review
What if the answer to today's struggles lies in the past? Beth and her husband finally have an infant son, but she wrestles with feelings of inadequacy as a mother and the fear that she's made a horrible mistake. She desperately tries to hide her inability to cope as she and her siblings process the terminal illness of their father, Patrick. While cleaning out the attic in her childhood home, Beth is puzzled to find notes clearly written by her mother, Grace, who died when Beth was young. As she reads Grace's description of her own pain and suffering, she realizes she has to learn what really happened to her mother if she's ever to climb out of her own darkness. The back-and-forth between Beth in the 1990s and Grace's notes from the 1950s creates momentum, and readers of epistolary novels will nod at Grace's depiction of the lack of choices for women of that time. Contrasting that with the stigma of getting mental health help, which was still strong in the '90s, Rimmer paints a picture of women finding their strength then and now.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Postpartum depression impacts two generations of women in Rimmer's illuminating tale of a family's unspoken troubles (after The Things We Cannot Say). After taking fertility drugs for six years during the 1990s, child psychologist Beth Walsh feels that having Noah, now five months old, was a mistake, and fears she might purposefully harm him, thoughts she keeps to herself and finds especially disturbing. Beth welcomes the distraction of helping her three older siblings clean out the family home in Seattle as their father, Patrick, enters hospice care with dementia. In the attic, she finds journal entries from her late mother, Grace. Written in the 1950s, they leave an unsettling image of the seemingly perfect Patrick, describing his unhappiness and heavy drinking. As the siblings pick up on Beth's depression and rally to get her help, their support contrasts with Patrick's dismissive response to Grace's "baby blues," as evidenced in the journal entries. In Patrick's dementia, he mistakes Beth for Maryanne, Grace's sister, and tries to apologize for past wrongs, leading Beth to clues about her parents' gloom. With a mix of engrossing mystery and deep feeling, Rimmer offers a harrowing account of a doomed mother's experience in the '50s and a family grappling with the truth. Rimmer's suspenseful narrative will enthrall and move readers. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Plagued with insomnia and feelings of inadequacy and unable to stand the cries of her newborn son, Beth cannot understand how the years of trying to get pregnant have gone so wrong. She and her brothers and sister grew up in a house full of love and support; Beth was always amazed at how her widowed father was able to raise four young children and run his own construction business. Now, she can't even look at her baby's face. When heart failure and dementia send her elderly father into hospice care, Beth throws herself into packing up the family home. Behind a locked attic door, she discovers a new set of her father's paintings and her mother's journal, with notes that indicate darker secrets in their family's history. Did their mother really die in an auto accident? Beth and her siblings endeavor to reveal the truth of their early childhood. VERDICT Best-selling author Rimmer (The Things We Cannot Say) expertly illustrates a heartbreaking portrayal of postpartum depression through multiple perspectives in dual time lines. For fans who appreciate emotionally wrenching reads such as those by Sarah Jio or Kristin Hannah.--Joy Gunn, Paseo Verde Lib., Henderson, NV
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