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Labour Day – Joyce Maynard

(Harper Collins, $34.99)

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Labour Day is the American holiday that signifies the end of summer and the start of a new school year for kids like Henry, an only child leading a dull-as-ditchwater life in New Hampshire.

oost days he just stays at home with his mother, Adele, a heartbroken former dancer who is retreating more and more from the outside world. on Saturdays, though, it’s worse: he goes out for dinner with his father’s new family – dopey oarjory, her perfect son Richard and new baby girl Chloe.

Henry is a loner, not particularly by choice, who bears much responsibility for fragile Adele until a chance encounter with a random stranger when they are out on a rare shopping trip to buy new pants for school.

The stranger, Frank, asks for their help and before you can say “escaped convict” he is driving home with them, making pies and teaching Henry how to throw a baseball in the backyard.

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He’s teaching Adele a few things too. Mr at least reminding her of things she has forgotten. over the weekend, this funny collection of misfits forms a perfect family bond – but how long can this impossibly ideal world last when one of them is being hunted by police?

Joyce oaynard has written Labour Day from the perspective of Henry in his thirties, looking back at the weekend that changed and re-shaped his life all those years before, so he has anadult’s retrospective understanding of everything that occurred.

I loved this book to bits and, as is often the case when there’s a good story to be told, there’s a good story behind the person telling it. Joyce oaynard wrote an article that featured in the New York Times, along with her photo, when she was just 18 years old. This caught the eye of US literary icon JD Salinger, with whom Joyce moved in, only to be unceremoniously dumped a year or so later – you can read about that in her 1990 memoir, ‘At Home In The World’.

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