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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A well-told story of love and redemption” (The Washington Post Book World) from the bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs
“A polished gem of a novel . . . lovingly crafted, beautifully written.”—The Miami Herald
Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard house on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work at Blessings are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him. Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present, what makes a person or a life legitimate or illegitimate and who decides, and the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community.
Blessings is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A well-told story of love and redemption” (The Washington Post Book World) from the bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs
“A polished gem of a novel . . . lovingly crafted, beautifully written.”—The Miami Herald
Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard house on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work at Blessings are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him. Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present, what makes a person or a life legitimate or illegitimate and who decides, and the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community.
Blessings is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
Chapter Two
In the early hours of June 24 a car pulled into a long macadam drive on Rolling Hills Road in the town of Mount Mason. The driver cut the engine, so that as the car rolled down the drive and into the oval turnaround between the back of the big white clapboard house and the garage, it made only a soft swishing sound, like the whisper of summer rain those first few moments after the dirty gray storm clouds open.
There were deer in the fields that surrounded the house, cropping the rye grass with their spotted fawns at their flanks. But the fields stretched so far from the drive on either side, and the deer kept so close to the tree line, that the does did not even raise their divot heads from the ground as the car slid past, although one or two stopped chewing, and the smallest of the babies edged toward their mothers, stepping delicately sideways, en pointe on their small hooves.
“I don’t feel that good,” said the young woman in the passenger seat, her hair veiling her face.
The moonlight slipping at an oblique angle through the windows and the windshield of the car picked out what there was of her to be seen: a suggestion of the whites of her eyes between the curtains of her hair, the beads of sweat on her arched upper lip, the silver chain around her neck, the chipped maroon polish on her nails—a jigsaw puzzle of a girl, half the pieces not visible. She was turned away from the driver, turned toward the door as though she were a prisoner in the car and, at any moment, might pull the door handle and tumble out. The fingers of one hand played with her full bottom lip as she stared at the black shadows of the trees on the rough silver of the lawns, silhouettes cut from construction paper. At the edge of the drive, halfway down it, was a small sign, black on white. blessings, it said.
Blessings was one of those few places that visitors always found, on their return, even more pleasing than the pleasant memories they had of it. The house sat, big and white, low and sprawling, in a valley of overgrown fields, its terrace gardens spilling white hydrangeas, blue bee balm, and bushy patches of catnip and lavender onto a flagstone patio that ran its length. The land surrounding it was flat and rich for a long ways, to the end of the drive, and then the stony mountains rose around as though to protect it, a great God-sized berm spiky with pine trees.
The house had a squat and stolid quality, as though it had lain down to rest in the valley and grown middle-aged. Ill-advised additions had been made, according to the fashion of the times: a den paneled in rustic pine, a long screened porch, some dormers scattered above the horizontal roof line like eyes peering down the drive. The weeping willows at one end of the pond dipped low, but the cedars at the other were too tall and rangy for grace, and there had been sporadic talk of cutting them down almost from the day they were planted. The gardens were of the most conventional sort, hollyhocks in the back, day lilies in the center, alyssum along the borders. Wild rhododendrons grew in the shade wherever a stream sprang from the ground to spill down the hillside and into the big pond, a lake almost, that lay along one side of the house. None of it amounted to much on its own.
But taken altogether it was something almost perfect, the sort of place that, from the road, which was how these two had first seen it, promised plenty without pretense, ease without arrogance. From the road Blessings looked like a place where people would sit on the terrace at dusk, sip a drink and exult in the night breeze over the mountain, pull a light cardigan around their shoulders, and go to bed...
About the Author-
Anna Quindlen is the author of many bestselling books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling novel Rise and Shine, the #1 bestselling memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life. Her other novels include Blessings, One True Thing, the Oprah Book Club Selection Black and Blue, and Still Life with Bread Crumbs.
Reviews-
August 26, 2002 Venturing into fictional territory far from the blue-collar neighborhoods of Black and Blue and other works, Quindlen's immensely appealing new novel is a study in social contrasts and of characters whose differences are redeemed by the transformative power of love. The eponymous Blessings is a stately house now gone to seed, inhabited by Mrs. Blessing, an 80-year-old wealthy semirecluse with an acerbic tongue and a reputation for hanging on to every nickel. Widowed during WWII, Lydia Blessing was banished to her socially prominent family's country estate for reasons that are revealed only gradually. Austere, unbending and joyless, Lydia has no idea, when she hires young Skip Cuddy as her handyman, how her life and his are about to change. Skip had promise once, but bad companions and an absence of parental guidance have led to a stint in the county jail. When Skip stumbles upon a newborn baby girl who's been abandoned at Blessings, he suddenly has a purpose in life. With tender devotion, he cares secretly for the baby for four months, in the process forming a bond with Mrs. Blessing, who discovers and admires his clandestine parenting skills. A double betrayal destroys their idyll. As usual, Quindlen's fine-tuned ear for the class distinctions of speech results in convincing dialogue. Evoking a bygone patrician world, she endows Blessings with an almost magical aura. While it skirts sentimentality by a hairbreadth, the narrative is old-fashioned in a positive way, telling a dramatic story through characters who develop and change, and testifying to the triumph of human decency when love is permitted to grow and flourish. (Sept. 24)Forecast:Count on this feel-good novel, a book that will appeal to the entire family, to ring up bestseller sales as a perfect Christmas gift.
May 1, 2002 A baby is abandoned at Blessing's, home to town matriarch Lydia Blessing, and she and her caretaker opt to raise it. The publisher considers this one more big step up for the ever-popular Quindlen.
Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 15, 2002 Quindlen's novels, including the best-selling "Black and Blue" (1997), evince a topicality and clear-cut moral authority reflective of her work as a columnist, currently for "Newsweek." Such an issue-oriented perspective can overburden fiction, but thankfully Quindlen is too fine a writer and too sensitive to the complexities of the human condition to write platitudinous fiction. Her newest novel, a work of glowing lyricism and genuine redemption, begins when a very young and nervous couple leaves a small box by the garage of a grand old estate called Blessings. The handyman, Charles "Skip" Cuddy, not long out of jail and sincerely grateful to be tending such beautiful property, finds their abandoned newborn baby and decides to care for her in secret. But it doesn't take his watchful employer, Lydia Blessing, long to discover her newest tenant or to fall in love with little Faith, just as Skip has. They make an odd pair, the motherless townie and the poor little rich octogenarian. Widowed for decades and still mourning the violent death of her brother, Lydia hasn't been much of a mother to her own daughter, and as she watches Skip revel in unexpected fatherhood, she is assailed by memories and suddenly realizes not only that she's lived a penitent's isolated and emotionally frugal existence but also why. Quindlen's lush descriptions of the splendor of the Blessing estate stand in evocative contrast to the rigidity of the upper-class mores that destroyed Lydia's and her brother's lives. Skip, too, is a victim of circumstances, but in spite of the injustices he's suffered, he is goodness incarnate and ultimately inspires all of Quindlen's compelling characters to embrace, not count, their blessings. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)
December 2, 2002 Quindlen's novel of redemption and second chances is given a warm, sympathetic reading by Allen. Skip Cuddy is one of life's losers: abandoned by his parents as a child and railroaded by so-called "friends" into a crime that wasn't his fault as an adult. But he's content with his new job as caretaker of Blessings, the estate of elderly, isolated Lydia Blessing. When a frightened unwed teenager leaves her newborn by Skip's garage apartment (instead of the estate's front door, as planned), Skip finds a new lease on life in taking care of the infant. And when Lydia discovers the baby and agrees to help Skip raise her, she too finds new meaning in life, as well as a mutually rewarding friendship with Skip. (Of course, eventually the baby's mother wants her back.) Allen's voice is filled with compassion, and she does a fine job differentiating the characters. Particularly memorable are the voices of elderly Lydia Blessing; Korean maid Nadine; and Chris, a sleazy, manipulative friend of Skip's. Simultaneous release with the Random hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 26).
October 15, 2002 Quindlen's short, sentimentally sweet new novel (following Black and Blue) is ultimately unsatisfying. The wealthy and reclusive 80-year-old Lydia Blessing lives in the eponymous "Blessings," the country estate to which she was banished by her family after the death of her husband in World War II. Two events conspire to change the remaining years of Lydia's life: she hires twentysomething Skip Cuddy as a handyman, and a baby is abandoned on her doorstep. Skip, whose friendship with some local lowlifes led to a stint in jail, tries to hide the existence of the baby from his prickly and critical employer, to no avail. Both Skip and Lydia fall in love with the baby, whom they name Faith, and in spite of their misgivings come together as a makeshift family. But after four months, their secret is revealed, and Faith is taken away. Quindlen's talent for realistic dialog can't overcome the melodramatic plot and one-dimensional characters. Of course, her fans will want to read this, but don't go overboard on the number you purchase. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/02.]-Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
The Boston Globe
"Quindlen writes with power and grace."
Newsday
"Like her columns, Quindlen's novels are written with intelligence, clarity and heartrending directness."
People
"Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Anna Quindlen demonstrates the same winning qualities that inform her journalism: close observation, well-reasoned argument and appealing economy of language. This portrait [is] illuminating and, as is true of most anything Quindlen writes, well worth the read."
Kirkus Reviews
"A refreshing, wise and truth-telling novel about life and marriage...Quindlen writes about women as they really are--neither helpless victims nor angry polemicists, but intelligent human beings struggling to do what's right for those they love and for themselves. A book to read and savor."
Michael Chabon
"Like a brush with mortality, One True Thing leaves the reader feeling grateful, wide awake, lucky to be alive."
San Francisco Chronicle
"A triumph."
Susan Isaacs
"Readers of her columns in the Times are aware that Anna Quindlen has a first-class mind; now they will know she has a great heart as well."
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