This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
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By Jonathan Evison
avg rating
1 review
‘As sweet as it is inventive, profound as it is hilarious, unflinching as it is big-hearted.’
Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned. But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease of life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriet’s past.
There, amid the buffets and lounge singers, between the imagined appearances of her late husband and the very real arrival of her estranged daughter mid-way through the cruise, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life. And in the process she discovers that she’s been living the better part of that life under entirely false assumptions.
Part-dysfunctional love story, part exploration of the relationship between mothers and daughters, nothing is what it seems in this charming tale of what it truly means to begin again.
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Uncharacteristically deciding to set sail on the Alaskan cruise left by late husband Bernard, 78 year old Harriet finds she is faced with coming to terms with uncomfortable truths about her life and the events that shaped her character. The book tackles some difficult issues in a poignant, quite humorous way with considerable empathy for Harrriet and the crazy situations she gets herself into on board ship.
I enjoyed this novel but found the numerous short 'snapshots of life' format rather fragmented the story line.
