SUSANNAH'S GARDEN

Author: Debbie Macomber ISBN: 0778323021 5/2006 CONTEMPORARY Publisher: MIRA

It was the year that changed everything. When Susannah Nelson turned eighteen, her parents sent her to school abroad. She said goodbye to her boyfriend, Jake-and never saw him again. She never saw her brother again, either; Doug died in a car accident while she was away. Now, at fifty, she finds herself regretting the paths not taken. Especially the chance to be with Jake... Long married, a mother and a teacher, she should be happy. But she feels there's something missing, although she doesn't know exactly what. Not only that, she's balancing the demands of an aging mother and a temperamental twenty-year-old daughter. Because her mother, Vivian, a recent widow, is having difficulty coping and living alone, Susannah prepares to make some hard decisions. In returning to her hometown of Colville, Washington, to her parents' house, her girlhood friends and the garden she's always loved, she also returns to the past and the choices she made back then. What she discovers is that things are not always as they once seemed. Some paths are dead ends. But some gardens remain beautiful....

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

SUSANNAH'S GARDEN was a great read. Busy as I am these days, I managed to finish it in only two sittings. I even stayed up hours later than usual the second night—it's that good! It's the story of a few weeks of transition in the lives of three generations of women, and all the melodrama in their seemingly quiet lives that led up to this moment in time.

Vivian Leary is an elderly woman with symptoms of dementia. She's having memory problems, and also seems to be hallucinating. Her daughter, a burned out schoolteacher who can't stop dreaming about an old high school boyfriend despite a reasonably good marriage, comes to help out her mother. Realizing how ill Vivian is, she moves her into assisted living and starts to clean out her childhood home. She also searches for the old boyfriend.

Then, Vivian's granddaughter shows up in town as well. She's immature at nineteen, and gets involved in a bad relationship very similar to the one her mother had back in high school.

Macomber does a masterful job of tying up all the loose ends, and I expect we'll see these characters again as her conclusion ties the book into Blossom Street, where that yarn shop is.

Cozy up with SUSANNAH'S GARDEN this summer!

Heather Hiestand