Up the Creek Book Club
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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
One True Thing
by Anna Quindlen
October 1998
Synopsis
"This novel follows the psychological travails of Ellen Gulden, who against all personal inclinations returns home to care for her dying mother, Kate, and eventually finds herself accused of mercy-killing. Ellen, an intelligent though not particularly warm person, has spent her life earning her professor father's approval. After achieving high school valedictorian and Harvard honors, she aspires to advance her New York career. At her father's insistence, however, she leaves her job and takes on the role of nurse and homemaker. Through long hours as companion to Kate, she discovers the real value of her mother's life." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "Ms. Quindlen knows how to batter our hearts with a dying patient's sad daily diminishment. She is adept too, in her depiction of the person who must cope most intimately with that diminishment; she causes Ellen, in effect, almost to become her mother as she learns to cook, to sew, to bake bread, to keep house -- to take up the domestic vocation from which she had shied. The sorrows of which I speak, and the pains Ms. Quindlen seeks to render, are not uncommon. The journey of Ellen and her mother is one that most of us know, or will come to know. What's surprising, enlightening or new about its fictional rendition must reside in the novel's narrator. But here that voice is alternately flat and clever -- never, for me, sufficiently resonant or memorable." (Frederick Busch - The New York Times Book Review)
- "So uncompromising in its portrait of life and death, so honest in its rendering of love and loss, that it is simply impossible to forget." (Alice Hoffman)
- "There is not a single false word in One True Thing. Readers of her columns in the New York Times are aware that Anna Quindlen has a first-class mind; now they will master the great heart at last." (Susan Isaacs)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Anna Quindlen
- 'Black and Blue'
- 'Happily Ever After'
- 'How Reading Changed My Life'
- 'Living out Loud'
- 'A Short Guide to a Happy Life'