The Rest of Her Life
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This incredibly nuanced, beautifully written novel treats moral dilemma with the riveting, character-driven plot of a Jane Hamilton or a Jodi Picoult. This novel looks at one incident and how it changes everything for Leigh, the mother of a pretty, popular high school senior, and their entire family. It’s a novel about mothers, daughters, sisters, and female friends, and the ripple effect that an accident has upon all of these people. Like so many great novels, it makes readers ask the question, “What would I do if this happened to me?”
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The Center of Everything was a book I raved about, a book I pushed on to unsuspecting people, a book I adored.
The Rest of Her Life is much more formulaic, more like a Jodi Picoult novel, with a sad problem revolving around human dynamics. Kara, a young girl about to graduate from high school, accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian. The book centers on Kara and her family and friends and their attempts to come to terms with what happened.
The scenes with Leigh, Kara's mom, with her own mother are the most vivid. Moriarty seems to do best dealing with the poor, with single moms, with disappointed people. But somehow the ending all falls flat; though Leigh works through her relationship problems, she never seems to draw lines between the black dots in her life.
It was a perfectly acceptable book of women's fiction, but it was no Center of Everything.
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