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beastreader's review against another edition
2.0
I really loved this author's book Whistling in the Dark. So I was excited to read her newest book. I really struggled with this book. This saddened me. I could not relate to the characters. I have read other books where the characters are dealing with personal issues and connected with them on an emotional level that drew me in and wanted to continue their journey through the highs and lows. This did not happen for me. I kept reading hoping this would change for me as again I loved the other book I read by this author. Although I did like the narrator, Grace. She did try her hardest to pull me into Tess's world. I finally had to put this book down after only a third of the way in.
judithdcollins's review against another edition
5.0
EXTRAORDINARY! When I see advance praise for a new book, from my two favorite authors, Beth Hoffman and Diane Chamberlain, I know this is an author and a book I need, want, and have to read!
Lesley Kagen's The Resurrection of Tess Blessing does not disappoint. Immediately after finishing, I purchased the novella to learn more about Tess and Birdie’s childhood. Recommend reading both.
Set in Ruby Falls, Wisconsin, we pick up with character Tess Blessing (the OCD “list-making” queen), from the novella, The Undertaking of Tess (formerly Tess Finley), now forty-nine years old, married to Will, for thirty years, and mother of Haddie and Henry, and lovable golden retriever, Garbo (the only one who seems to cooperate).
Will is the owner of the local popular Main Street 50’s style diner, Count Your Blessings where Tess helps out as well. Tess has all sorts of worries and fears (like her childhood); appears tragedy follows her everywhere she goes.
She is no longer the star of her children’s lives and she still holds on to her favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird,, and continues to experience panic attacks. Now her concerns are real adult ones, so she has still had her imaginary friend, Grace to help her bear the load.
A list of Tess’ new problems:
If any of you have read my review of The Undertaking of Tess, you will learn how excited I was to discover this newfound author. The Resurrection of Tess Blessing is a poignant, emotional, and moving story, of a woman’s journey of dysfunction and life’s messiness, mixed with humor and wit. I laughed so hard, as Kagen has some great one-liners and so loved Tess’ To-Do Lists and the way she strikes through the ones checked off. Priceless.
A page-turner you will not be able to put down, fast-paced, keeping you in suspense to learn what the heck is going on with Will, dying to find out about Birdie, and rooting for some much-needed happiness for Tess.
Lesley’s writing is unique as her character development is superb, with insightful feelings and thoughts, crossing over to psychological. The book reminded me a little of Elizabeth Hein’s How to Climb the Eiffel Tower (cancer, bad childhood, social issues, and funny as heck), Claire Cook’s sense of humor, and Amy Hatvany and Jennifer Weiner’s style of tackling highly-charged subjects with brutal honesty and hilarious laugh out loud humor and wit.
A book for every woman of any age, crossing many genres from marriage, relationship, family, dysfunction, sisters, siblings, love, motherhood, fears, mental illness, social issues, tragedy, grief, redemption, forgiveness, cancer, and most of all the humor.
If you love complex, poignant, funny, and uplifting self-discovery reads, The Resurrection of Tess Blessings is for you!
A special thank you to SparkPress and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
#JDCMustReadBooks
#TopBooksof2014
Lesley Kagen's The Resurrection of Tess Blessing does not disappoint. Immediately after finishing, I purchased the novella to learn more about Tess and Birdie’s childhood. Recommend reading both.
Set in Ruby Falls, Wisconsin, we pick up with character Tess Blessing (the OCD “list-making” queen), from the novella, The Undertaking of Tess (formerly Tess Finley), now forty-nine years old, married to Will, for thirty years, and mother of Haddie and Henry, and lovable golden retriever, Garbo (the only one who seems to cooperate).
Will is the owner of the local popular Main Street 50’s style diner, Count Your Blessings where Tess helps out as well. Tess has all sorts of worries and fears (like her childhood); appears tragedy follows her everywhere she goes.
She is no longer the star of her children’s lives and she still holds on to her favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird,, and continues to experience panic attacks. Now her concerns are real adult ones, so she has still had her imaginary friend, Grace to help her bear the load.
A list of Tess’ new problems:
• Will, her husband is going through a mid-life crisis. She suspects he is having an affair with sexy Connie from the diner. (No sex action between the sheets at home. He disappears on Wed nights returning with blond hairs and smelling of Tabu) not good signs.
• At her age she still has Grace, her IF (imaginary friend), thank goodness. Her sister Birdie has IF (Bess).
• Tess has just discovered she has breast cancer and may die; no religious faith, and cannot tell anyone in the family of her illness. She is alone with PTSD and OCD among other fears
• Haddie, her eighteen-year-old daughter has an eating disorder; anorexia and bulimia, and she does not know how to help.
• Henry, her fifteen-year-old son, is distant, cruel and does not give her the time of day.
• Louise, her bitchy, self-centered mother (from novella), has recently died; her mother still talks to her from the grave, with continued sarcastic remarks and chimes in on every thought. She has to bury her once and for all and scatter her ashes.
• Birdie, her main problem. She has to get her to talk to her. Her fragile, agoraphobia, OCD, much loved sister is living in Boca and is not speaking to her, because they had a difference of opinion of trying to save their mother. Now she has to get her to help her spread their mother’s ashes. Thus far Birdie is ignoring her, and she may have to play the "cancer card".
If any of you have read my review of The Undertaking of Tess, you will learn how excited I was to discover this newfound author. The Resurrection of Tess Blessing is a poignant, emotional, and moving story, of a woman’s journey of dysfunction and life’s messiness, mixed with humor and wit. I laughed so hard, as Kagen has some great one-liners and so loved Tess’ To-Do Lists and the way she strikes through the ones checked off. Priceless.
A page-turner you will not be able to put down, fast-paced, keeping you in suspense to learn what the heck is going on with Will, dying to find out about Birdie, and rooting for some much-needed happiness for Tess.
Lesley’s writing is unique as her character development is superb, with insightful feelings and thoughts, crossing over to psychological. The book reminded me a little of Elizabeth Hein’s How to Climb the Eiffel Tower (cancer, bad childhood, social issues, and funny as heck), Claire Cook’s sense of humor, and Amy Hatvany and Jennifer Weiner’s style of tackling highly-charged subjects with brutal honesty and hilarious laugh out loud humor and wit.
A book for every woman of any age, crossing many genres from marriage, relationship, family, dysfunction, sisters, siblings, love, motherhood, fears, mental illness, social issues, tragedy, grief, redemption, forgiveness, cancer, and most of all the humor.
If you love complex, poignant, funny, and uplifting self-discovery reads, The Resurrection of Tess Blessings is for you!
A special thank you to SparkPress and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
#JDCMustReadBooks
#TopBooksof2014
kdurham2's review against another edition
3.0
Check out the full review at Kritters Ramblings
A book with quite an interesting character who is trying to keep a lot of things in the air and I am not sure she is doing it all that well. Tess has grown up a lot since the novella reviewed this morning and she has created quite the to do list to accomplish. She has quite the hurdles in her life to overcome - a medical diagnosis for her and for her daughter, a husband who doesn't seem connected in the relationship and a son who is doing the teenage years.
This as well as the novella have an interesting narrator - an imaginary friend. I am not sure that I enjoyed having this really different narration - I didn't mind it as much in the novella due to the girls being childhood ages, but being adults and having this imaginary friend tell the story was just a little odd. AND it was hard to read at a few times, I wish Tess had told her own story, it made me feel less connected to Tess.
A book with quite an interesting character who is trying to keep a lot of things in the air and I am not sure she is doing it all that well. Tess has grown up a lot since the novella reviewed this morning and she has created quite the to do list to accomplish. She has quite the hurdles in her life to overcome - a medical diagnosis for her and for her daughter, a husband who doesn't seem connected in the relationship and a son who is doing the teenage years.
This as well as the novella have an interesting narrator - an imaginary friend. I am not sure that I enjoyed having this really different narration - I didn't mind it as much in the novella due to the girls being childhood ages, but being adults and having this imaginary friend tell the story was just a little odd. AND it was hard to read at a few times, I wish Tess had told her own story, it made me feel less connected to Tess.
minn3h's review against another edition
3.0
It's like a good Lifetime movie; it checks all the right boxes, but you know someone has already done it better elsewhere.
leafingthroughlife's review against another edition
3.0
After witnessing her father's death at a young age and spending the rest of her childhood in the shadow of her cruel and unpredictable mother, it's no wonder that Tess Blessing and her sister Birdie carry with them a life of trauma and fear. Even into middle-age, Tess is riddled with paranoia and hassled by the cynical voice of her now dead mother that haunts her thoughts. Lately, it seems like it's even harder for her to cover up her tendency toward unexpected panic attacks and irrational fears, especially as she suspects that her husband Will's extra time spent running the family diner might actually be spent having an affair, her daughter Haddie leaves for art school while struggling with an eating disorder, and her formerly sensitive, lovable baby boy, Henry, turns into a sullen teenager. When Tess is feeling at her most hollow and helpless, life deals her another blow - a diagnosis of breast cancer. The Resurrection of Tess Blessing gives us the story of how Tess, facing the possibility of her own imminent mortality, must set out to repair her family and herself before the cancer can claim her.
Once again, I've managed to read an entirely Lesley Kagen book and yet only realize while paring it down to its summary what a very dark, depressing book it appears to be. It seems Kagen is a master at dealing with devastating topics with a light touch, and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing highlights that talent yet again. Part of the way Kagen accomplishes that lightness is with her unusual choice of a narrator. The story is told from the perspective of Grace, Tess's imaginary friend, who's always around but only shows herself in times of extreme need. As Tess undergoes treatment and chisels away at her pre-death to-do list, Grace is always there to add a little levity and a sympathetic inside look at Tess's life thus far.
Despite its clever telling and its light touch, I struggled a little with The Resurrection of Tess Blessing because it took me a long time to actually start liking the characters. The husband that glibly drops his wife off for a lumpectomy and then heads to work, the prickly daughter with her hostile responses to her mother's efforts to get her to eat food, and the typical teenage boy who can't be bothered by those around him but requires a certain amount of babying all the same are necessarily aggravating because, of course, they have redeem themselves with flying colors at some point, right? Tess herself with all her groundless fears, quirks, people-pleasing tendencies, and paranoia was a hard character for me to love, too. I feel as if she is the sort of character that moms everywhere will see parts of themselves in, but for the rest of us who aren't moms and just have one, this book gives us plenty of reasons to feel guilty about the dozen tiny ways we might hurt our own mothers ever day.
On the whole, though, The Resurrection of Tess Blessing is a sweetly told tale of a woman's life flashing before her eyes at length. Characters that rub the wrong way at first are all part of a touching payoff that's totally worth it. By the end, you will be rooting for Tess to overcome her fears, see her family members for who they really are, and rediscover the life she'd imagined.
Once again, I've managed to read an entirely Lesley Kagen book and yet only realize while paring it down to its summary what a very dark, depressing book it appears to be. It seems Kagen is a master at dealing with devastating topics with a light touch, and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing highlights that talent yet again. Part of the way Kagen accomplishes that lightness is with her unusual choice of a narrator. The story is told from the perspective of Grace, Tess's imaginary friend, who's always around but only shows herself in times of extreme need. As Tess undergoes treatment and chisels away at her pre-death to-do list, Grace is always there to add a little levity and a sympathetic inside look at Tess's life thus far.
Despite its clever telling and its light touch, I struggled a little with The Resurrection of Tess Blessing because it took me a long time to actually start liking the characters. The husband that glibly drops his wife off for a lumpectomy and then heads to work, the prickly daughter with her hostile responses to her mother's efforts to get her to eat food, and the typical teenage boy who can't be bothered by those around him but requires a certain amount of babying all the same are necessarily aggravating because, of course, they have redeem themselves with flying colors at some point, right? Tess herself with all her groundless fears, quirks, people-pleasing tendencies, and paranoia was a hard character for me to love, too. I feel as if she is the sort of character that moms everywhere will see parts of themselves in, but for the rest of us who aren't moms and just have one, this book gives us plenty of reasons to feel guilty about the dozen tiny ways we might hurt our own mothers ever day.
On the whole, though, The Resurrection of Tess Blessing is a sweetly told tale of a woman's life flashing before her eyes at length. Characters that rub the wrong way at first are all part of a touching payoff that's totally worth it. By the end, you will be rooting for Tess to overcome her fears, see her family members for who they really are, and rediscover the life she'd imagined.
jillhannaha's review against another edition
5.0
Anyone who has read some of Lesley's other books like WHISTLING IN THE DARK, and GOOD GRACES, will know she can put herself into the mind of a young girl with a sense of humor looking at the sometimes dark world she lives in. In this case, Tess Blessing is a middle-age woman who loves her teenagers too much (is that possible?), her husband of thirty years - as much as she did the day she married him, and her quirky sister, Birdie, who she's been estranged from for way too long.
As if Tess doesn't have enough on her plate, breast cancer has been tossed into her life. The childhood voice that Lesley does so well comes in flashbacks of Tess and Birdie's less-than-happy childhood, and how they've dealt with it (or not dealt with it) as adults.
This novel (for me) took be back down memory lane with random things like the mention of Ovaltine, or graham crackers and butter (both things I still love from my childhood.) Tess just wants what most of us want: A simple life with those we love, and for them to love us back.
With Tess's compulsive list-making, she sets out to 'fix' things in her life and for those she loves, as we cheer her on through the novel to cross out each item on her list, to make things right for everyone she cares about. A great read!
As if Tess doesn't have enough on her plate, breast cancer has been tossed into her life. The childhood voice that Lesley does so well comes in flashbacks of Tess and Birdie's less-than-happy childhood, and how they've dealt with it (or not dealt with it) as adults.
This novel (for me) took be back down memory lane with random things like the mention of Ovaltine, or graham crackers and butter (both things I still love from my childhood.) Tess just wants what most of us want: A simple life with those we love, and for them to love us back.
With Tess's compulsive list-making, she sets out to 'fix' things in her life and for those she loves, as we cheer her on through the novel to cross out each item on her list, to make things right for everyone she cares about. A great read!
silver_valkyrie_reads's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
A very readable story that I knocked down a bit in rating for having terrible theology, especially the relativism. I will say that I appreciated the portrayal of mental health struggles in this story, as some of the anxiety and panic attacks and such were very relatable, but didn't trigger my brain to go 'ooh, yeah, that reminded I could feel anxious right now!' like some portrayals do.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer
Moderate: Death of parent, Eating disorder, Panic attacks/disorders, Sexual content, Emotional abuse, and Medical content
Minor: Suicide attempt
bluekaren's review against another edition
5.0
Don’t you just love when a book gives you good feels? This book was great and made me feel so good. The writing is addictive, I could not put it down. I want more of Tess and Birdie and more IFs. I rooted for Tess the whole time. The Resurrection of Tess was the story of a woman checking off her to-do list and couldn’t have been penned better!
The whole story is told through the narrator, Grace, who is Tess’ guardian angel/imaginary friend, (IF). Tess has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Tess had a traumatizing childhood with a mother who didn’t show love, and now she has a sister that won’t talk to her and a (possibly) failing marriage with two kids who have a bit of trouble showing their love. Tess sets out with a to-do list to make a few things right before she departs from this life. This story takes us through sisterhood, heartbreak, and abuse. Lesley Kagen skillfully guides us through Tess’ journey with tears and humor.
This book touched me in a way few reads can. Tess’ story is close to home for me. Tess is growing older and she suspects her husband may be cheating on her. As if this wasn’t bad enough, her children are going through problems of their own and take them out on poor Tess. On top of that the only one who knows what Tess really went through in her childhood, her little sister Birdie, won’t talk to her anymore. She is lonely and suffering with PTSD that affects everything in her world.
I loved this tale. I don’t usually cry while reading, and almost never with someone sitting in the room with me. I felt bad for Tess. I cried big sloppy alligator tears for her. I just couldn’t help it. Tess and I have similar issues with our kids, and that really got me. Tess reminisces a lot, because her past is so haunting and her present is so not right. The characters felt so real to me. I rooted for Tess and awed at her strength. I appreciated that not everything got magically resolved. In real life, somethings just don’t and we accept what we got. This book shows that asking for help is necessary sometimes and true strength comes from within.
The whole story is told through the narrator, Grace, who is Tess’ guardian angel/imaginary friend, (IF). Tess has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Tess had a traumatizing childhood with a mother who didn’t show love, and now she has a sister that won’t talk to her and a (possibly) failing marriage with two kids who have a bit of trouble showing their love. Tess sets out with a to-do list to make a few things right before she departs from this life. This story takes us through sisterhood, heartbreak, and abuse. Lesley Kagen skillfully guides us through Tess’ journey with tears and humor.
This book touched me in a way few reads can. Tess’ story is close to home for me. Tess is growing older and she suspects her husband may be cheating on her. As if this wasn’t bad enough, her children are going through problems of their own and take them out on poor Tess. On top of that the only one who knows what Tess really went through in her childhood, her little sister Birdie, won’t talk to her anymore. She is lonely and suffering with PTSD that affects everything in her world.
I loved this tale. I don’t usually cry while reading, and almost never with someone sitting in the room with me. I felt bad for Tess. I cried big sloppy alligator tears for her. I just couldn’t help it. Tess and I have similar issues with our kids, and that really got me. Tess reminisces a lot, because her past is so haunting and her present is so not right. The characters felt so real to me. I rooted for Tess and awed at her strength. I appreciated that not everything got magically resolved. In real life, somethings just don’t and we accept what we got. This book shows that asking for help is necessary sometimes and true strength comes from within.
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