Annie Brown is in the kitchen getting dinner together for her four kids when she tells her husband Bill to get her some Advil because she has a headache. Next thing her family knows, she is on the floor. Just like that, she is gone. Dead from a brain aneurism at the age of thirty-seven.
Bill and Annie's kids don't know what hit them. Over and over, Bill is shocked by the foreverness of it and has a pervasive feeling like homesickness. His profound loss is emphasized through the minutiae of daily life (he is struck at how Annie anticipated things as a mom like when the toilet paper roll was getting low, she would put a new one on the toilet's tank). Bill's grief leads to him putting too much responsibility on the oldest child, thirteen-year-old Ali.
When her father begins dating someone else, Ali is bothered that her father can have another wife, but she and her brothers can't ever have another mother. Annie's life-long best friend, Annemarie, tries to step in to assist the family, but she is dealing with her own loss. In addition to that, Annemarie feels herself teetering on the edge of her sobriety. As she would always say at her NA meetings, "my best friend saved me" because of Annie sneaking her into a room at the assisted living center where she worked so Annemarie could stay there for her detox.
Anna Quindlen takes us through the family's stages of grief without excess sentimentality, and with realism. Annie's absence is experienced through the trivialities of daily life: at one point Ali is hit by the fact that she now knows to take the chicken out of the freezer in the morning like her mom did, or there will be nothing to cook for dinner. After Annie is a sad subject matter but leaves off with notes of hope. In addition, the characters are imperfect and relatable. I give Anna Quindlen's new novel four stars out of https://youtube.com/shorts/voBW2q3onD0?si=_IJX4L9cg_6Wfidp
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