Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
LETTING GO FOR GOOD . . .
Once, Jane Moore and Alexandra Walsh were inseparable, sharing secrets and stolen candy, plotting their futures together. But when Jane became pregnant at seventeen, they drifted slowly apart. Jane has spent the years since raising her son, now seventeen himself, on her own, running a gallery, managing her sister’s art career, and looking after their volatile mother—all the while trying not to resent the limited choices life has given her.
Then a quirk of fate and a faulty elevator bring Jane into contact with Tom, Alexandra’s husband, who has some shocking news. Alexandra disappeared from a south Dublin suburb months ago, and Tom has been searching fruitlessly for her. Jane offers to help, as do the elevator’s other passengers—Jane’s brilliant but self-absorbed sister, Elle, and Leslie Sheehan, a reclusive web designer who’s ready to step back into the world again. And as Jane quickly realizes, Tom isn’t the only one among them who’s looking for something . . . or traveling toward unexpected revelations about love, life, and what it means to let go, in every sense.
In this insightful and irresistible novel, by turns profound, poignant, and laugh- out-loud funny, acclaimed Irish writer Anna McPartlin tells a story of friendship and love, of the families we are born into and the ones we create for ourselves, and of the hope and strength that remain when we fi nd the courage to leave the past behind at last.
Publishers Weekly
McPartlin (Pack up the Moon) builds a thin novel around a missing person and the music she adored. After 36-year-old Alexandra Kavanagh disappears while running an errand in Dublin, her bereft husband, Tom, begins a small but determined effort to find her until a chance encounter with Jane Moore, Alexandra’s childhood friend, helps Tom to galvanize his search efforts. With assistance from Jane’s artist sister, Elle, and Web designer Leslie, Tom and Jane mount a national campaign, but as the search turns up dead end after dead end, the quartet finds that life continues apace: Jane and Elle resolve traumas and grievances, Leslie reaches out to new friends, and Tom learns to let go of his grief. Although McPartlin’s sense of humor helps these unlikely bonds of friendship to come to life, the plot is light on the suspense and pathos one might expect from a missing-person story, and since Alexandra is often conveyed in such a roundabout way—often by use of her favorite song lyrics—her disappearance, while central, is at odds with her incidental presence. (Apr.)