Search - The Rest of Her Life

I thought this was an awful book, It was more about the mothers problems and I thought had little to do with the poor teenage daughter who actually went through something horrible.

After reading everyone's review of this book and someone saying they liked it even more than "The Center of Everything" (which I read twice because I enjoyed it so much) I just had to read "The Rest of Her Life." I was very disappointed. First off, everyone said this was a sequel to "The Center of Everything" (which is why I bought it). It's NOT. It is a completely different story. "The Center of Everything" was much better and kept me turning the pages. With "The Rest of Her Life" I kept looking to see how many pages I had to go before I finished it. Not that it was a horrible book but just not very good. I found the plot rather boring and the characters really bland. I especially hated how it ended. It didn't leave me wanting to read a sequal but I think Laura Moriarty could have done a better job tying up the loose ends. It almost seemed like she just wanted to end the story and so she did. No deep meaning behind it, no make you feel good moments, nothing.

It had promise... and then it dragged.

I was highly disappointed by this book. I was hoping for some great insight as to the "strained" relationship between mother and daughter but found only a typical teenage girl and the everyday normal battles with her mother. I felt that the mother (Leigh) was extremely selfish and more concerned with "being right" rather than trying to reach out to her daughter (Kara). It was obvious that they loved each other, but it seemed to me like Leigh wanted Kara to do all the work for the relationship since she "had done nothing wrong." In the end, the tragedy was overshadowed by an overbearing selfish mother who only wanted her daughter to do what she wanted her to do and was upset when she didn't. Ultimately, Leigh is disapponted by her relationship with her own mother but learns nothing from any experinece in the book, more worried about "doing things right" as a mother instead of feeling true compassion for her daughter. I felt no love for Leigh's character, making this a very difficult book to enjoy.

How many parents worry each time their kid takes the car out that something awful will happen? This is the story, told from the mother's point-of-view, of the aftermath of just such a tragedy. Powerful reading, painfully real.