With a Greek-chorus-like narrative style and a nonlinear approach, This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison works. Harriet Chance is a charming, sympathetic seventy-eight year old main character. Even more importantly, Harriet is human, with eccentricities and faults of her own, and with a mixed-up, messy life in which many people will find some point they relate to.
Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/09/this-is-your-life-harriet-chance.html
Reviewed based on a copy received through a publisher's giveaway. Thank you Shelf Awareness.
Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/09/this-is-your-life-harriet-chance.html
Reviewed based on a copy received through a publisher's giveaway. Thank you Shelf Awareness.
I just couldn't warm up to this one. I kept waiting for it to get really good based on the reviews, but it just never did. Harriett is 78 and her husband of many years just passed away 9 months before. She discovers that he purchased a cruise and so she goes on the cruise alone. Her daughter that she has had difficult relations with for years ends up joining her and they start to patch up their relationship. But the book is told in non-chronological snippets of Harriett's life and as we learn more snippets we learn that her husband had a 40 year affair with her friend, she was sexually abused as a child, her daughter is a recovering alcoholic, her son is attempting to sell her house and put her in a home so he can obtain her money, and most sad that she never felt fulfilled through her entire life or that she really lived her life. I didn't like the way it was written going back and forth through time and didn't like any of the story line apart from Harriett and her daughter starting to patch up their relationship.
I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. It is written in a very light-hearted style, but covers some weighty issues.
