Jennifer has recently lost Danny, the love of her life, and she’s trying to put the pieces back together, without much success. When news reaches her that her grandmother has had a fall and is in the hospital, she leaves right away, heading out to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to be by her grandmother’s side. Sam, short for Samantha, is the only person in the world Jennifer has left, and if anything were to happen to her, Jennifer’s not sure she could make it.
She returns to the house on the lake she knows so well, surprised and yet not surprised how much is the same. Sam looks white and pale when Jennifer reaches the hospital, and she hasn’t yet awoken from the coma she slipped into shortly after her accident. Jennifer decides to stay in town until Sam wakes up, no matter how long that will be, and sets up housekeeping for herself at Sam’s, putting in for a leave of absence at work.
When Jennifer goes to the room she always stays in, she finds several envelopes with her name on them, waiting on the vanity table. She opens the first to find that they are from Sam, and that she wants Jennifer to read them all through, one at a time and not rushing through the whole stack. There are things she wants Jennifer to know, the most surprising one being that she never truly loved her husband.
As Jennifer goes back and forth between the hospital and the house, she comes to know her grandmother in a new way, seeing for the first time the insecurity Sam felt as a young wife and mother, and how she was finally able to find true love in a most unconventional way. Meanwhile, Jennifer enters an unconventional relationship of her own with Brendan, a boy (now a man) she knew from visiting Sam here as a child.
This book shows that we don’t always know our loved ones as well as we thought we did, but being willing to listen to their stories can make us love them all the more.
If you’re concerned about content, I would suggest that you skip chapter forty-two. Overall, I found the book enjoyable and recommend it.
(This book was published in 2004 by Little, Brown.)
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