Review: Welcome Home, Stranger

Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Christensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 Stars rounded up for lack of half stars.

Okay, I'm going to be the loan reader who found that this was just not the book for me, nor is it for anyone who may suffer from depression. This book was filled with angst, recriminations, fights, falls off the wagon, and the typical things that most women face once they hit a certain age. None of this was prettied up. I have never read a book where so much 'bad' happens to one person.

I admit the authors' descriptions of everything were wonderful, and I admire the fact that Rachel may end up happy in her new circumstances - but it did not help me one bit from feeling a bit depressed as I read this novel. The life that these sisters grew up with was bad enough, but to heap so much other crap onto one person was just too much for me. I might have liked this more had the ending not left me wanting to drown myself in a big bottle of wine.

This was a quick read for me, though after about 3/4 of the way through this book, I did a tiny bit of skimming. Perhaps that makes this an award-winning novel, but just not for me.

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Can you ever truly go home again?

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

Then things really fall apart.

Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters—an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister’s best friend–Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is.

Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now.