Rest of Her Life, The

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Author(s):

Laura Moriarty

Label: Hyperion
Publisher(s):

Hyperion

Studio: Hyperion
Manufacturer: Hyperion
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh?s family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh?s perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry.

Like the best works of Jane Hamilton, Jodi Picoult, and Alice Sebold, Laura Moriarty?s The Rest of Her Life is a novel of complex moral dilemma, filled with nuanced characters and a page-turning plot that makes readers ask themselves, "What would I do?"

Customer Reviews

Lives Forever Changed by Accident

The Rest of Her Life ,by Moriarty, has the feel of a Jodi Picoult, Alice Sebold novel. It is the story of Kara, an eighteen year old high school senior, who kills another teenage student from her community in a driving accident. The story revolves around Kara's family and how the accident impacts their lives as they try to cope with guilt and community reprecussions while still protecting their daughter.The story is mostly centered on Kara's mother, Leigh, who, at the time of the accident, has a very strained relationship with her daughter. The accident forces Leigh to confront the demons of her relationship with her own mother .Her abandonment at age 18 led to an intense anger which has walled her off from getting close to anyone, including her daughter.It is in sympathizing and empathizing with the dead girl's mother and handling the revengeful outbursts of her loss that Leigh finds a place of her own maternal strength and understanding. There are moments of awesome power as Leigh protects Kara when she is accosted by the dead girl's mother as well as when Leigh reaches into the depths of her compassion and maternal love to reach out to this same mother in deep empathetic understanding of her terrible loss.Finally Leigh is able to reach her daughter and support her in a way she had never been able to before.
This novel is excellent for a book group discussion .

A real page turner that examines a family's relationships

Eighteen year old Kara Churchill is on her way home and she stops to pick up a stray dog so it won't get hit. When she pulls back on the road, she's talking on her cell phone and laughing with her passenger and doesn't see sixteen year old Bethany Cleese. Bethany dies in the accident. Kara is numb with grief and at first, the family doesn't know how to cope. They hire a lawyer who recommends Kara apply for a diversion. By doing that, Kara can do community service instead of going to trial, and she won't have a record, so she can go to college in the fall. At first Kara refuses to apply for the diversion because she feels she deserves to be punished. Kara's Aunt Pam comes to visit and Kara's mother (Leigh) notices the ease in the relationship between Kara and Pam, and that makes her examine the relationships in her life. Pam helps Kara make a decision about how to deal with the accident - at first her parents aren't happy with it but they learn to accept it.

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty tackles some tough issues about families. I really liked this book. It's about so much more than the accident. It's about relationships in a family. After the accident, Leigh realizes that her relationship with Kara is strained and she doesn't know how to repair it. It's about learning to accept yourself, your friends and your family. Leigh sees that she's not a very good friend when she is confronted by her only close one. Leigh is definitely a flawed character, but I think she is one most of us can relate to.

GOOD READ

THE REST OF HER LIFE

I love Laura Moriarty and her writing. This book, along with her first, THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING, should not be missed.

A young girl, Bethany, is accidentally hit and killed by a car driven by 18 year old Kara. This book tells what this accident does to two families, Bethany's and Kara's.

I thought the book would center around Kara; however, Leigh, Kara's mom, was the main character.

Leigh has had a rough life growing up. Her mom, while hard working and loving her two daughters, moves them around constantly and complains all the time about having to work, not having anything, and never having any time to herself. While she loves her daughters, that love comes across as resentment. She is not a good mom; while she tries to be, she pretty much leaves the girls to fend for themselves.

After Leigh becomes a mother herself, she too, has a tough time showing her children love and affection. She loves her kids, she just can't say it or show it or do the "mom" things she needs to do to let her kids know she cares. She constantly is in a turmoil and feeling bad about not being the type of mother she dreamed she would be. She is mostly on the outside looking in at her kids as they radiate towards their dad. While her relationship with her son is an easy one, the relationship between herself and Kara is tense and almost hateful.

After the accident, Leigh and her family's EVERYTHING are totally turned upside down. Everyone in their small town knows everyone and news of the accident quickly spreads. The book is about their coping, coming to terms with what happened, and in the end, Leigh's ability to finally get through to her daughter. In an odd sense, the tradgey of the accident seems to pull the two women closer.

This was a good and quick read. The characters were life-like and likeable. The pure and raw anguish of Bethany's mom brought me to tears several times.

This book is not a downer, just a well written account of people and their lives after a horrible event. I highly recommend this book, along with THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING.

Thank you.

Pam

A Fateful Accident

Although it is true that this book starts off with the tragedy from which the rest of the events flow, even that does not explain why, from almost the first sentence, the words seemed to be practically dripping with despair.

"The Rest of Her Life" is seemingly focused on a terrible accident that takes one young girl's life (Bethany) and forever alters that of the young girl (Kara) that hits her in a car accident ...but which, at least in my humble opinion, delves far deeper into the life of Leigh Churchill, Kara's mother.

While she is trying to deal with all of the effects of the accident upon herself, her family, her emotions...we learn that Leigh is in deep denial about herself and her relationship with her daughter. Prior t the accident, she internally reflects that she is happy, that her family is happy, but that hardly seems true. There seem to be far too many unspoken frustrations between her and her husband, Gary. Gary and their son, Justin, have a very strained relationship, and it appears at times that Justin is almost afraid of his father. Leigh and Kara seem to do little more than inhabit the same house.

This is a story of a seemingly perfect small town family...one mom, one dad, a son and daughter...picket fence and all. Yet that fence certainly does not surround a happy home. Gradually we find out that the reason Leigh is unaware of this is that her childhood and her relationship with her mother was barely functional to start with, and ended when her mother left her at 16.

Some of Leigh's thoughts about and reactions to her daughter seemed nearly implausible to me. She simply doesn't know how to talk to or react to or even look at her daughter. It seems as if her detachment with Kara stemmed from either Kara being her first child, or possibly due to Kara being a girl and Leigh's unconscious replication of her own mother's attitude.

"The sadness she was feeling, she decided, was for Kara, for the sense of having already lost her. The arrival of the college catalogs made their impending separation seem real and imminent, and Leigh had the sense that she'd run out of time without accomplishing a task she couldn't quite name, failing them both in some important way."

But then with Justin, the universality of her motherly instincts floored me.

"Watching (Justin) from the window, Leigh felt a surge of unaccountable and overwhelming love. She wished she could be invisible for a moment. She would go outside, put her hands around Justin's waist, and without his knowing, lift him high enough so he could easily drop the ball into the hoop."

There are few people, other than Gary and Justin that Leigh has anything approaching a real relationship with. Her one friend, Eva, is kept at extreme arm's length. Her co-workers..."I keep to myself, she had more or less told them, with every averted glance and fleeting smile, with every lunch break she spent reading at her desk or talking to Gary on her cell phone. She couldn't say, for certain, why she had taken pains to shut them all out. It wasn't something she had planned on or even thought about - her behavior felt instinctive, somehow linked to her very survival."

The car accident is her daughter's. Although many of Leigh's thoughts afterward start out with Kara, they invariably turn to her. Everything she feels and thinks is ultimately about her. At the heart of it, she only knows, trusts, has herself.

"She had to lean against the counter for a moment, overwhelmed by self-loathing and sadness. She was within thirty feet she loved most in the world, and she'd never felt more alone."

In "The Rest of Her Life", a tragedy takes the life of a young girl, and forever alters another young girl, but ultimately is the most ironic type of gift to Leigh. It reveals that her emotions and relationships are on the brink of destruction, and she is able to reach a level of self-awareness and strength that allows her to pull back from the edge and choose a different path. Where she had no real life before, now she has a rest of her life, one she no longer has to live alone.

"This was perhaps what it was like to mother anyone, Leigh decided, far away or close. You could only try your best, then wait to see if what you sent was needed or even wanted. If it wasn't, then you packed a new box, and tried again."

Excellent book

This is the first book I've read from this author. I thought it was very well written, and while the subject matter is a bit of a downer, it definitely made me think-- there are moments in our lives that simply change everything, not just for ourselves but for all the people around us. This book serves as a reminder that those of us who have not faced a tragedy like this are perhaps nothing more than lucky.

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