the endless summer

As hard as I tried to like Anna Quindlen's new novel I just couldn't do it UNTIL the tragedy.
I was close to giving up although I knew horror was sure to follow at the next turn of a page.
Even knowing that, I was taken by surprise by the events that totally captured my heart.
From then on I was hooked.
Tears not in the middle where they should have been, but at the end, when Mary Beth's mother asks her, "how are you doing?"
"I'm trying," she replies.

One of my favorite parts portrays a conversation between Mary Beth and her teenaged, poet daughter Ruby.
"Ruby loved to tell me things I didn't know... and that afternoon, she had told me about the butterfly effect, how the beating of their wings in Mexico could cause a breeze in our backyard. 'That's kind of terrifying,' I replied. But even as I spoke I realized that that was what we had all believed from the moment we had children. The breast-fed baby became the confident adult. The toddler who listened to a bedtime story went on to a doctorate. We flapped our wings in our kitchens, and a wind blew through their futures.
'It is terrifying,' Ruby had said, but with gusto. 'But it makes you think before you act.'"