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Count the Ways: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 13, 2021
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In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives
Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.
Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.
Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.
A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow
- Publication dateJuly 13, 2021
- Dimensions6 x 1.41 x 9 inches
- ISBN-10006239827X
- ISBN-13978-0062398277
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Editorial Reviews
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“A fearlessly candid, heartrendingly forthright examination of the joys and terrors of family life from the perspective of a woman of unusual sensitivity and empathy, Count the Ways takes us on a memorable journey.” — Joyce Carol Oates
"Cut[s] across moments of national and personal upheaval to examine the complex web of family against the backdrop of history." — New York Times Book Review
"Wonderfully absorbing, precise and emotionally astute . . .I was moved by the characters' ambivalences, their misgivings, their anger, but most of all by their complex and fascinating love." — Marisa Silver, New York Times bestselling author of The Mysteries
"Sensitively plumbing the complexity of human emotions, of love and forgiveness, [Maynard] draws readers into a deep, aching attachment to her characters, creating an ultimately hopeful tale just right for this moment." — Booklist (starred review)
"The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all. . . Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Readers will sink into Maynard’s masterful portrait of one woman’s life in this decades-spanning family saga.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“How did Maynard know that this is exactly the book we all need now? This exhilaratingly brilliant novel isn’t just an indelible story of the falling dominoes of a family struggling through crisis and through generations, it’s also about the times we live through. . . . This gorgeous story reminds us that love is always, always worth it.” — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You
“Joyce Maynard is the queen of the family saga, and Count the Ways is the best! Instantly addicting, the story of Eleanor, Cam, and their children pulls you in and wraps itself around you like an heirloom quilt made of familiarity, intimacy, and the orchestral complexity of loving the people closest to us. This is the novel you’ll be longing to return to at the end of every day and one you will re-read for years to come.” — Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family
“Count the Ways is the book you will want to curl up in a chair and read from beginning to end. It’s rich and complex, beautiful and heartbreaking, just like life. Reading about this flawed and lovely family will make you want to hug your own flawed and lovely family tight. Joyce Maynard celebrates the messy, wonderful thing that is love." — Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and The Book That Matters Most
“Count the Ways is an extraordinarily generous invitation into a woman’s intimate life, from the loneliness of her youth to the earned wisdom of middle age. In this richly imagined novel, Maynard never flinches as she portrays both quiet successes and heartbreaking failures at love, marriage, and motherhood. This is the work of one of our great storytellers.” — Meredith Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Beneficence
“My to-do list had umpteen items on it, but I let them all go to hell as I tore through Joyce Maynard’s latest page-turner. . . . To-do list? What to-do list? Under the Influence is a riveting read.” — New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb on Under the Influence
“Joyce Maynard has, again, managed to tap flawlessly into the voice of a teenage girl: part hope, part fiction, and all heart. After Her is page-turning mystery, wrapped in a beautifully rendered story of sisterhood; and reading it is a journey through one’s own memory of what it meant to be thirteen, when the world was equally terrifying and fascinating. Books this compelling just don’t come around very often.” — Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author on After Her
About the Author
Joyce Maynard is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column, “Domestic Affairs.” Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Maynard divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
Product details
- Publisher : William Morrow (July 13, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 006239827X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062398277
- Item Weight : 1.36 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.41 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #145,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,130 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #3,873 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #9,327 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Count the Ways: A Novel
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About the author
A native of New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life”, in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale.
Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in over fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more, and a longtime performer with The Moth.
Maynard is the author of seventeen books, including the novel To Die For and the best-selling memoir, At Home in the World—translated into sixteen languages. Her novel, To Die For was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry for a film directed by Gus Van Sant , in which Joyce can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman’s lawyer.. Her novel Labor Day was adapted and directed by Jason Reitman for a film starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, to whom Joyce offered instruction for making the pie that appeared in a crucial scene in the film.
The mother of three grown children, Maynard runs workshops in memoir at her home in Lafayette California. In 2002 she founded The Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where she hosts a weeklong workshop in personal storytelling every winter.
She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.
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I loved reading this incredibly touching, and at times very sad, book. The struggle of a woman trying to make a perfect life and at the same time trying to find herself was painful to watch. Through all the changes, disappointments, and pain, her love for her children never wavers. She finds that life is not simple and that you can’t protect your children or yourself from all of life’s disappointments.
Couldn’t put the book down following Eleanor.
obligations. He’s a handsome sculptor with a roving eye and infrequent employment. Yet, Eleanor finds happiness with him, as they build their family, even though she shoulders the majority of the adult responsibilities, as if a job and fidelity were too much to ask of her immature, wayward, lackadaisical husband. I often loathed Cam, and wanted him to grow up and get his act together.
When tragedy strikes, fault lines appear in the marriage and grief threatens to overtake the couple, already burdened with crushing financial stress and lack of communication. Everyone retreats within themselves in order to cope, and Eleanor moves out of the beloved farm home, so that the children’s lives can remain as intact as possible. In the years that follow, the two oldest children have ever-decreasing contact with their mother, due to miscommunication and omission, and Cam retains his hero status in their eyes. I was conflicted about Eleanor’s decision to stay silent for so long, but understood her self-sacrificing love for her children, and her desire to protect them. The book explores many themes: infidelity, domestic violence, gender identity and AIDS. Most of these issues are experienced by the strong supporting characters, but they are woven expertly into the story.
This is a well-written book that is complex and enthralling. It’s easy to get immediately caught up in the story, as the reader takes the circuitous journey with this family. The unwavering love shines through, and Maynard seems to strive to want this tale to be about forgiveness. There does seem to be an inordinate amount of tragedy in this book, but it is a compelling and worthwhile read.
First of all, this is NOT just another fictional "retrospective" of a Baby Boomer but rather a story of discovery and the reality of life's meaning and purpose, as seen through the eyes of Eleanor, an only child of parents who barely tolerated her existence. Then, everything changes after a tragedy, when sixteen year-old Eleanor's life begins anew with dreams of better things and the perfect life and family she wants most.
With the exception of the prologue and the first few chapters, this poignant story unfolds in roughly chronologically order, allowing us to experience Eleanor's life as she lives it, giving it a fresh perspective of each event, thought, and emotion in real time. Although the first few chapters cast a dark shadow and premonitions over the storyline, readers will quickly like Eleanor's character as she matures amid many challenging and also exciting experiences.
Set almost exclusively in New England and primarily in New Hampshire, the location and historical contexts add charm and personality to Eleanor's story, especially as she and Cam find love and build a new family on a quaint rural farm in a spartan farmhouse.
Joyce Maynard creates a series of unique and quirky characters that add depth and color to the young families misadventures. The author's focused storytelling reveals Eleanor's inexperienced approach to reality, combining good intentions, wishful thinking, and life's surprises into tales that might resemble and explain similar experiences in our own lives or the lives of those we know, making the story highly relatable.
This entertaining read takes time to enjoy and absorb, much longer than normal for me. In part because I kept trying to understand the things Eleanor wasn't sharing or ignoring in her one-sided accounts. This made the story more realistic and believable.
I also purchased Audible's narration supplement that was a nice touch, adding depth and pacing to the complex story.
Overall, this was a worthwhile reading experience. At times, I felt the author had a checklist of issues and experiences she pushed into the storyline, while also sensing a few too many coincidences to tidy up the plot.
Perhaps the strongest element of the story is Eleanor's reassessment of her own experiences and the motives of others. Even with all her flaws, misjudgments, and poor timing, Eleanor remains likeable, especially as her older and wiser perspectives emerge.
There's something in this book for everyone, making it a good option for reading groups and those wanting to discuss it.
Definitely 4.5 Stars!