The Rest of Her Life
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In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another. Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh's perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry. Like the best works of Jane Hamilton, Jodi Picoult, and Alice Sebold, Laura Moriarty's The Rest of Her Life is a novel of complex moral dilemma, filled with nuanced characters and a page-turning plot that makes readers ask themselves, "What would I do"
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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.
