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The Things We Do for Love: A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “[Kristin] Hannah is superb at delving into her main characters’ psyches and delineating nuances of feeling.”—The Washington Post Book World
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Women comes a poignant, evocative story that celebrates the magic of motherhood, the joys of coming home, and the price we so willingly pay for love.
Years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child have broken more than Angie DeSaria’s heart. Following a painful divorce, she moves back to her small Pacific Northwest hometown and takes over management of her family’s restaurant. In West End, where life rises and falls like the tides, Angie’s fortunes will drastically change yet again when she meets and befriends a troubled young woman.
Angie hires Lauren Ribido because she sees something special in the seventeen-year-old. They quickly form a deep bond, and when Lauren is abandoned by her mother, Angie offers the girl a place to stay. But nothing could have prepared Angie for the far-reaching repercussions of this act of kindness. Together, these two women—one who longs for a child and the other who longs for a mother’s love—will be tested in ways that neither could have imagined.
“Enormously entertaining . . . Hannah has a nice ear for dialogue and a knack for getting the reader inside the characters’ heads.”—The Seattle Times
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Women comes a poignant, evocative story that celebrates the magic of motherhood, the joys of coming home, and the price we so willingly pay for love.
Years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child have broken more than Angie DeSaria’s heart. Following a painful divorce, she moves back to her small Pacific Northwest hometown and takes over management of her family’s restaurant. In West End, where life rises and falls like the tides, Angie’s fortunes will drastically change yet again when she meets and befriends a troubled young woman.
Angie hires Lauren Ribido because she sees something special in the seventeen-year-old. They quickly form a deep bond, and when Lauren is abandoned by her mother, Angie offers the girl a place to stay. But nothing could have prepared Angie for the far-reaching repercussions of this act of kindness. Together, these two women—one who longs for a child and the other who longs for a mother’s love—will be tested in ways that neither could have imagined.
“Enormously entertaining . . . Hannah has a nice ear for dialogue and a knack for getting the reader inside the characters’ heads.”—The Seattle Times
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Community Reviews
Not my favorite by hers, but still a good read! I was most drawn to the storyline of the woman who deals with infertility and loss of a child through miscarriage and adoption.
“Too many women that shouldn’t raise a child were granted that gift, while others lived with arms that felt empty.” Angie is “one of that group…The unmarrieds. People would assume things about her because she’d failed at marriage…a single woman with no children and no romantic prospects had plenty of thinking time…She sighed, wanting to ask her mother how she’d gotten to this place in her life, a thirty-eight-year-old single, childless woman.”
Lauren is “a good girl…On [her] way to becoming a good woman…who made a mistake” raised by a mother who “said she raised one mistake and wouldn’t do it again…There it was, the whole of their mother-daughter relationship reduced to a single word. Sorry.” The mother-daughter-sister triangle is a theme threaded through the tapestry of Kristin Hannah’s oeuvre, “like strands of a single rope. When they came together, they were unbreakable.”
Set in the wild Washington coast and spiced with Italian cuisine, The Things We Do for Love is a novel of food and family. “The restaurant was the anchor of their family; without it, they might drift away from one another. And that, the floating on one’s own tide, was a lonely way to live…Cooking was more than a job or a hobby; it was a kind of currency…You work at DeSaria’s. That makes you family…However much life changed, a part of it stayed the same…family was in her blood and her bones. They were with her always…Family will always show you where to begin.”
While it is no happy-ever-after, the novel echoes the bittersweet biblical Ruth narrative. It’s a story about expectations and disappointment, choices and resilience, the inchoate pain of impending loss, and the unexpected paths love comes to us. “Love can get us through the hardest times. It can also be our hardest times…Love bangs us up a bit in this life…but it doesn’t go away.” The Things We Do for Love is a tribute not only to how easily love gets broken but “how durable love can be.” A must read!
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