Modern Mamma Marvels

I received this book for review this past weekend but was finishing up another novel. I started it on Monday evening. I finished it last night. When I wasn’t reading the book, I was thinking about the story, the characters and my own current experiences. Perhaps the book was hitting a little too close to home as two of my very close family members are awaiting biopsy results. That’s right: this book deals with cancer. And pregnancy. And literature. And some sex. And summer on the beach. With kids.

Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand (Little, Brown and Company, June 2007) was one of those novels that I just didn’t want to put down. Of course, as a mother to a toddler and a pregnant woman with an ever increased need to pee, I occasionally had to walk away from the book. Again, it may be attributed to the fact that cancer is so prevalent in my mind right now. Or maybe because it’s summer, the season of the book. Or maybe I just wanted to escape from the laundry piling in baskets but, really, I can’t say enough about this book without giving away the ending.

The book revolves around two sisters, Vicki and Brenda, and their friend Melanie, who escape to Nantucket for the summer, complete with Vicki’s two kids and weekend visits from Vicki’s husband. They all are in desperate need of such escape, all for their own reasons. Vicki has just been diagnosed with lung cancer and will actually be receiving her chemo on the island. Brenda has been fired from her job as a professor at a college because of a relationship she had with a student. And Melanie just found out that her husband is having an affair right about the same time that she found out that they were pregnant, naturally, after seven failed IVF attempts.

Sounds like a house that you don’t want to be in even if it is on a nice little island, right?

Truth be told, Melanie annoyed the bejeebus out of me at various points in the early half of the book. Morning sickness is not pleasant for anyone but the incessant whining, both for her condition and after her sniveling husband, left me wanting to bash her face off of the reality post. Brenda felt much the same way and neither woman had many nice things to say to one another. Meanwhile, Vicki is putting up the fight of her life… for her life all while making a mental list of things that don’t matter anymore. (I think we could all learn to make a list of things that, honestly, don’t matter.)

Enter Josh. Actually, he enters on the first page but after you learn that these women are fighting battles of their own, he enters in a grand way. As the babysitter. In the summer between his junior and senior years of college, he’s trying to earn money and distance himself from an ex-girlfriend. What he finds in a house full of women is surprising to him and the reader. Perhaps I just had a soft-spot for his name as he shares it with my Husband, but I wanted to cuddle this college-aged boy and tell him that, “Oh honey, it will be okay.”

There are some real gems of thought and writing throughout the book. Melanie’s painful (physical and emotional) experiences with infertility will speak volumes to anyone who has been through the unfortunate journey. What spoke loudest to me was a moment when Vicki is recounting what parenting her two boys has meant to her on a night when her mind won’t let her sleep due to anxiety about everything going on in her life.

“Vicki had entered into motherhood wholly unprepared. She had woken up confused when the nurse brought Blaine in to feed on the night he was born. The reality had sunk in, gradually, over the past four and a half years. This child is my responsibility. Mine. For the rest of my life.”

She goes on to list a series of things that we can all relate to as mothers, from getting the baby to eat to the baby’s first word (of course, Dada) to Elmo’s voice. I found myself nodding along, recounting my own experiences with BigBrother. But I’m not facing cancer, not facing death’s door. It made me shudder to just mentally switch shoes with my own mother for the moment as she awaits the results of her biopsy. I’m not ready for thoughts like those; I don’t think you’re ever ready for thoughts like those.

The book ended somewhat predictably but in a pleasing way. Everything wrapped up a little too neatly for my taste but, I can’t honestly complain because at least things were wrapped up. I’m not a fan of the open ending and this book does bring closure to all of the possible story lines.

Frankly, if you’re looking for an enjoyable book to read this summer that challenges your emotions and causes you to think about your own life in a few ways, I’d urge you to pick up this book. I honestly wouldn’t want to read it in the winter because it would make me absolutely long to sit on a beach. I’m doing that in about a month so I’m not overly upset that I don’t currently have “sand between my toes,” which, of course, is this book’s cure all for what ails you.