Run

I've no idea what made me want to read this book though it was almost certainly somebody else's blog. I finally got hold of it on Read It Swap It, a site I'm starting to use more often now as I find it  has books I actually want to read, unlike Bookmooch which doesn't. I knew nothing of Ann Patchett, although I now know she won the Orange Prize for Bel Canto in 2002. I think if I'd picked this up in a bookstore and read the gushing review extracts on the back I probably wouldn't have bought it:
"Her books are so warm, so overflowing with love and affection, that when you've finished reading one your first inclination is to embrace it" (Guardian). Hmmmm....
However, having read it, I have to say I can see what they mean, though I don't think I'd have expressed it in quite those terms. But, in fact, this really is a novel about love. Not love between men and women, which hardly figures at all, but love within families. The family at the centre of the book is that of Doyle, a widower and an ex-mayor, who has been bringing up his three boys in a university town somewhere in America. The eldest, Sullivan, twelve years old when his mother died, has made a mess of his life and, at the beginning of the book, has returned home under a cloud from many years living abroad. The two younger boys, Tip and Teddy, are African-American brothers who were adopted as babies when Doyle's wife found she could not have any more children. At the start of the book they are young adults, Tip a serious-minded university student deeply absorbed in the study of marine life and Teddy, sweet natured and spiritually inclined, thinking of entering the priesthood. But one snowy night, their lives are turned upside down when Tip is rescued from a potentially fatal car accident by a woman who pushes him out of the way at the last minute and is badly injured herself as a result. The Doyles get her into hospital and then find themselves responsible for Kenya, her eleven year old daughter. Taking Kenya home, they gradually discover that the child knows all about them and their lives -- that she and her mother, in fact, have been watching them from a distance for as long as Kenya can remember. Unwillingly, she at last reveals the secret she has been told never to tell -- her mother is in fact Tip and Teddy's birth mother. The reactions of the family members are various, and confused, and the novel tells the story of how they each, in their different ways, come to accept, to understand, and to love. To some extent this is a novel of secrets, and several more are revealed as the book unfolds. Patchett writes with tremendous understanding of the way people relate to each other, the way they deal with grief and loss, and, finally, the way love can draw people together. Despite some great sadness along to way, the ending is entirely uplifting. Read it!