Blog Tour: The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellyn Bache

[amazon_image id="0062033689" link="true" target="_blank" size="large" ]The Art of Saying Goodbye: A Novel[/amazon_image]

Title: [amazon_link id="0062033689" target="_blank" ]The Art of Saying Goodbye: A Novel[/amazon_link]
Author: Ellyn Bache
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Publication Date: June 7, 2011
Publisher: William Morrow

She was the thread that wove their tapestry together.

With a group of women as diverse as the ladies from Brightwood Trace, you might not think them to be close. There’s Julianne, a nurse with an unsettling psychic ability that allows her to literally feel what her patients feel, Andrea, a strong fortress sheltering a faltering core, Ginger, a mother torn between being a stay-at-home mom or following her career aspirations, and Iona, the oldest, whose feisty, no-nonsense attitude disarms even toughest of the tough. Not exactly the ingredients for the most cohesive cocktail . . . Until you add Paisely, the liveliest and friendliest of the clan, who breathed life into them all.

But when their glowing leader falls ill with cancer, it’s up to these women to do what Paisely has done for them since the beginning: lift her up. Overcoming and accepting the inevitability of loss, the women draw closer than ever; finding together the strength to embrace and cherish their lives with acceptance, gratitude and most importantly, love. Finally living with the vigor that Paisely has shown them from the start, they are able to see their lives in a new light, while learning to say goodbye to the brightest star they’ve ever known. Over the course of just three months, these four women will undergo a magnificent transformation that leaves nobody unchanged.

Initial Thoughts:

After reading the first chapter, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book. The POV shifted from character to character and kind of left me in a whirlwind. First, one character would be narrating and then the story would suddenly shift to another character’s narration. When a book is just starting out, I find that type of narration to be very confusing. As a reader, I’m trying to figure out who the characters are and how they connect to each other. But, I pressed on and once I got into chapters two and three, the story seemed to settle into one or two characters interacting at a time, which I found much easier to follow. It remains to be seen how the rest of the book will flow, but initially I find the narration a bit clunky and confusing. The storyline itself is quite interesting and has grabbed my interest. Check back soon for my full review!

About the Author:

A native of Washington, DC, Ellyn Bache studied English at the Universities of North Carolina and Maryland, but didn’t begin writing seriously until the first two of her four children were born and she knew, for sanity’s sake, she’d better find an “adult” activity to do at home during the children’s naps. She began as a freelance newspaper journalist while teaching herself to write fiction. After nearly six years of rejection slips, her short stories began to be published in both commercial magazines like Good Housekeeping and Seventeen, and literary magazines ranging from Shenandoah to the Carolina Quarterly. A collection of sixteen of her stories, The Value of Kindness, won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize.