The Art of Mending: A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Revelations about a seemingly ordinary mother force her adult children to reexamine their lives in this “absorbing novel about family secrets” (The Dallas Morning News).
Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year’s gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family’s restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness.
Readers have come to love Elizabeth Berg for the “lucent beauty of [her] prose, the verity of her insights, and the tenderness of her regard for her fellow human” (Booklist). In The Art of Mending, she confronts some of the deepest mysteries of life, as she explores how even the largest sins can be forgiven by the smallest gestures, and how grace can come to many through the trials of one.
Laura Bartone anticipates her annual family reunion in Minnesota with a mixture of excitement and wariness. Yet this year’s gathering will prove to be much more trying than either she or her siblings imagined. As soon as she arrives, Laura realizes that something is not right with her sister. Forever wrapped up in events of long ago, Caroline is the family’s restless black sheep. When Caroline confronts Laura and their brother, Steve, with devastating allegations about their mother, the three have a difficult time reconciling their varying experiences in the same house. But a sudden misfortune will lead them all to face the past, their own culpability, and their common need for love and forgiveness.
Readers have come to love Elizabeth Berg for the “lucent beauty of [her] prose, the verity of her insights, and the tenderness of her regard for her fellow human” (Booklist). In The Art of Mending, she confronts some of the deepest mysteries of life, as she explores how even the largest sins can be forgiven by the smallest gestures, and how grace can come to many through the trials of one.
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Community Reviews
I enjoyed this novel for its clear and lovely writing, and for its exploration of trying to get to the truth buried through the decades in a family's unhappiness. The main question in The Art of Mending is this: was Caroline, the middle sibling, really the object of abuse by her mother, as she claims to her siblings when all are middle-aged? Or is she really just a tiresome drama queen, as her mother claims and as her sister, Laura, and brother, Steve, tend to believe?
Laura also wonders what lies beneath her mother's often-distant persona:
"My mother, smiling brightly, looking directly into your eyes before she embraced you tightly, would feel a million miles away. My father, averting his gaze before he took you into his arms, would be the one who felt close."
Overall Berg did a splendid job of painting the characters: Laura, who married late and is happily married with two children; her mother, a former beauty who wavers between emotional stiffness and bursts of warmth; Caroline, wearing her emotional damage like an expensive and showy necklace that she wants everyone to notice. I liked Laura's unapologetic embracing of motherhood as something that fulfills her to the max.
A few quibbles: Laura is supposedly a professional quilter, and in a few scenes she is in the store where she buys her materials, chatting up the gay manager, a character drawn in shocking gay stereotypes: he is preening, self-important, easily out of patience with other customers who don't share his artistic taste. How did Berg get away with this in a modern novel? There is a single scene describing Laura's home workshop, with a level of detail about the tools of her trade out of balance with the attention given in the book to her work. I think Berg was simply trying to make the "mending" theme carry from the family drama to Laura's own profession.
Overall, I enjoyed how Berg teased out the family drama, when we are not sure of who was completely telling the truth.
Laura also wonders what lies beneath her mother's often-distant persona:
"My mother, smiling brightly, looking directly into your eyes before she embraced you tightly, would feel a million miles away. My father, averting his gaze before he took you into his arms, would be the one who felt close."
Overall Berg did a splendid job of painting the characters: Laura, who married late and is happily married with two children; her mother, a former beauty who wavers between emotional stiffness and bursts of warmth; Caroline, wearing her emotional damage like an expensive and showy necklace that she wants everyone to notice. I liked Laura's unapologetic embracing of motherhood as something that fulfills her to the max.
A few quibbles: Laura is supposedly a professional quilter, and in a few scenes she is in the store where she buys her materials, chatting up the gay manager, a character drawn in shocking gay stereotypes: he is preening, self-important, easily out of patience with other customers who don't share his artistic taste. How did Berg get away with this in a modern novel? There is a single scene describing Laura's home workshop, with a level of detail about the tools of her trade out of balance with the attention given in the book to her work. I think Berg was simply trying to make the "mending" theme carry from the family drama to Laura's own profession.
Overall, I enjoyed how Berg teased out the family drama, when we are not sure of who was completely telling the truth.
I love Elizabeth Berg. One of my favorite books of all-time is Talk Before Sleep. I chose to read this simply because I love her writing style. She just knows how to make a good story flow.
While not my favorite book she has ever written, The Art of Mending tells a great story that touches the heart and makes you think about how you are with your own family.
While not my favorite book she has ever written, The Art of Mending tells a great story that touches the heart and makes you think about how you are with your own family.
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