The Rest of Her Life

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.