Faithful by Alice Hoffman

I don't know that anyone would be interested, but I read...alot.  And to hang on to a shred of my 30 years of librarianship and Reader's Advisory service, I write book reviews, fairly short ones, for GoodReads, NetGalley, Amazon, Pinterest, Barnes & Noble.  Nothing spectacular, just what I think. So I thought I would just start adding them here, too.  What the heck.

And I'm starting it off with a book I've just finished that in many ways hit home.  My mother passed away almost 4 years ago, and it devastated me.  Perhaps because my father had died when I was very young, and she raised me and my two younger brothers by herself.  She never remarried.  She claimed my late father was the love of her life.  But we lived in a small town, and she had many brothers and sisters to provide emotional support for her.  She told me once, she had knew she had to stop crying after he died of polycystic kidney disease.  She had three little children to raise and she couldn't let Grief take her over.  I recognized her story, and mine, in Alice Hoffman's Faithful.

Grief and loss....like falling helplessly, hopelessly into a black hole. All the "what ifs..." and the "I should haves..." that run through one's mind, examining all ways that this mindnumbing loss could have been prevented. Having been through this type of loss four years ago when my mother passed, I easily recognized the desolation Shelby feels when her best friend is left comatose, after a black ice incident when Shelby had been driving. Reliving the incident in every moment endlessly on some type of hideous loop of self destruction and self recrimination.

And yet, this story is not the sad descent into hopelessness that one may expect. It's the powerful story of the support of family and friends, and even strangers. Working one's way through grief and again finding worth in your own being. Being faithful to the person you've lost and to yourself. Dealing with Grief can take years, and it never really goes away. One just gets better at dealing with it in microsteps. And one can find truths in one's own hidden depths. This is a touching story, full of hidden hope. Don't miss it.

And that's where I was for a long time.  In a black hole.  Recriminations of how I treated her, or should have done better by her.  And yet knowing all along, she'd tell me not too.  We'd loved each other and we were there for each other when necessary.  And slowly, slowly I've pulled myself out and felt like caring about life and the future again.Okay, enough sadness for now.