One True Thing Book

Part of becoming an adult is developing an accurate sense of your parents and of their relationship. It is when her mother is dying and her father demands that she abandon her career as a journalist and come home and take charge, that Ellen finally starts to fall out of love with his academic brilliance and his arrogance. It is through sitting with her mother reading classic novels and discussing Elizabeth Bennett and Anna Karenina that Ellen comes to question a lot of her own rather facile values. And then her mother dies of an overdose and Ellen, who wrote a prize- winning school essay on euthanasia, finds herself charged with murder, betrayed by her ambitious lawyer boyfriend and a pawn in corrupt local politics. Anna Quindlen's intelligent novel demonstrates her preparedness to learn from thrillers the use of suspense to enhance our sense of developed characters interacting complexly. Although the plot is set up too provide rather too many crudely diagrammatic ethical situations and the puzzle of how Kate died is rather less opaque than it needs to be, this is a strong popular novel about death and love, which deals with both issues and emotions. --Roz KaveneyRead More