Tuesday Intro: They May Not Mean To, But They Do

Molly Bergman moved to California, and it broke her mother's heart. There are daughters who spend their lives trying to escape their mothers, who move to their particular California the minute they're able to, who never stop moving to California. Molly was decidedly not one of those daughters. It was a painful move even before her parents got, so suddenly, so old.

They May Not Mean To, But They Do
by Cathleen Schine

This novel is at the top of my very modest library stack. It came in just before we left on vacation, but I didn't want to take a library hardcover along on the trip. Now it's due on Saturday. I plan to finish Dear Committee Members  today, and hopefully get started on this tonight.

Schine's earlier novel, The Three Weissman's of Wesport (a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility) was just plain fun and I requested this book from the library immediately after reading Audrey's review. I have a feeling it will strike a chord with me, as well.

Here's the Goodreads summary:

The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don’t just grow, they grow old, and the clan’s matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy’s beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. And they didn’t count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids. 

The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called “full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [ Jane] Austen’s own” (The New York Review of Books), and she is at her best in this intensely human, profound, and honest novel about the intrusion of old age into the relationships of one loving but complicated family. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a radiantly compassionate look at three generations, all coming of age together.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.