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kaulyjo 's review for:
The End of Your Life Book Club
by Will Schwalbe
When Will Schwalbe's mother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he and she start an informal book club that meets mostly during her chemo treatments. The list of books is free-wheeling, not dependent on theme or author. It's a mix of new reads and old favorites. In the larger sense, it's an opportunity for a mother and son to say goodbye through the medium of books, something they have both enjoyed throughout their lives.
This book has been on my "to-read" list for a long time, and I finally picked it up in the store the other day, sitting down to begin as soon as I got home. I wish I could say the anticipation was bested by the book, but it wasn't.
Though it's clear that Will's mother, Mary Ann, was a good woman, I never grew to particularly care for her. Maybe it's the upper-crust life that she lived, so unimaginable for me, or maybe it's just that, sometimes, she seemed a little too proper for my taste. She said all the right things and did all the right things, but it all felt just a little too much. And this is more her story than Will's, so it's important that you like her, but when the book reached its inevitable conclusion, I wasn't all that moved.
I think part of my disconnect, right or wrong, was grounded in the juxtaposition between Mary Ann's end-of-life experience and my own mother's. While Mary Ann is allowed to pay for the best care, my mom ended up in a nursing home chosen almost solely because it's what Medicare would pay. While Mary Ann is allowed to die in bed, surrounded by her friends and family, my mother passed, alone, with me somewhere in the middle of a 15 hour road trip, trying to get home. It's an inequity that Mary Ann (and Will) recognizes, but it still didn't make her experience any more endearing to me.
One final note to explain my disappointment, though it may not necessarily excuse it, is that I was hoping to read the book and get a few more titles for my "to-read" list. It didn't happen. For whatever reason none of their books interested me, so I wasn't even grounded in that part of the story.
In the end I don't know whether to recommend the book or not. It could just be my mileage that caused the disappointment. However, I certainly can't give it a full endorsement, so take that for what you will.
This book has been on my "to-read" list for a long time, and I finally picked it up in the store the other day, sitting down to begin as soon as I got home. I wish I could say the anticipation was bested by the book, but it wasn't.
Though it's clear that Will's mother, Mary Ann, was a good woman, I never grew to particularly care for her. Maybe it's the upper-crust life that she lived, so unimaginable for me, or maybe it's just that, sometimes, she seemed a little too proper for my taste. She said all the right things and did all the right things, but it all felt just a little too much. And this is more her story than Will's, so it's important that you like her, but when the book reached its inevitable conclusion, I wasn't all that moved.
I think part of my disconnect, right or wrong, was grounded in the juxtaposition between Mary Ann's end-of-life experience and my own mother's. While Mary Ann is allowed to pay for the best care, my mom ended up in a nursing home chosen almost solely because it's what Medicare would pay. While Mary Ann is allowed to die in bed, surrounded by her friends and family, my mother passed, alone, with me somewhere in the middle of a 15 hour road trip, trying to get home. It's an inequity that Mary Ann (and Will) recognizes, but it still didn't make her experience any more endearing to me.
One final note to explain my disappointment, though it may not necessarily excuse it, is that I was hoping to read the book and get a few more titles for my "to-read" list. It didn't happen. For whatever reason none of their books interested me, so I wasn't even grounded in that part of the story.
In the end I don't know whether to recommend the book or not. It could just be my mileage that caused the disappointment. However, I certainly can't give it a full endorsement, so take that for what you will.