Thank You for All Things

Thank You for All Things

Sandra Kring

Genre: Women's Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): At twelve, Lucy Marie McGowan already knows she’ll be a psychologist when she grows up. And her quirky and conflicted family provides plenty of opportunity for her to practice her calling. Now Lucy, her “profoundly gifted” twin brother, Milo, her commitment-phobic mother, and her New Age grandmother are leaving Chicago for Timber Falls, Wisconsin, to care for her dying grandfather—a complex and difficult man whose failure as a husband and father still painfully echoes down through the years.

Lucy believes her time in the rural town where the McGowan story began will provide a key piece to the puzzle of her family’s broken past, and perhaps even reveal the truth about her own missing father. But what she discovers is so much more—a lesson about the paradoxes of love and the grace of forgiveness that the adults around her will need help in remembering if their family is ever to find peace and embrace the future.

By turns heart-wrenching and heart-mending, Thank You for All Things is a powerful and poignant novel by a brilliant storyteller who illustrates that when it comes to matters of family and love, often it is the innocent who force others to confront their darkest secrets.

Review: Narrated by a precocious yet naive twelve year old girl, this novel was unexpectedly thought provoking.  It delves into complicated family dynamics as Lucy builds a relationship with her dying grandfather, while simultaneously trying to discover who her father is.  The novel focuses on the day to day interactions between a new age grandmother, an emotionally damaged mother, and a daughter trying to uncover her family's secrets.  Managing to strike a balance between sweetly funny and sorrowful, this was a very good read.

Rating: 4 stars