It is a story I will not forget easily.“Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it. I found it compelling and deeply emotional.
It deals with illness and death, love and loss in devastating detail. This novel is profoundly sad and uncompromising. But it is Ellie who is arrested and we are left in disbelief as she “covers” for her father. As if Kate did not know?As Kate’s health worsens, so Ellie becomes closer to her and when the end does come, Ellie suspects that George has overdosed her mother’s morphine. Ellie struggles to understand why he is so distant and believes him to have been frequently unfaithful to his wife. The charismatic George, on the other hand, seems to do everything he can to avoid helping his wife, believing that this should be done by a woman.
The pair start a two woman club called the Gulden Girls’ Book and Cook Club and rediscover old classic books which enable Kate to tell Ellie the things she never told her growing up. She wonders how she will cope.However, during the next five months, Ellie and Kate form a relationship they never thought possible. It is delivered as a “fait accompli” and leaves Ellie with little choice, even though she has never had a great relationship with her mother. Their home is a welcoming place filled with their mother Kate’s craftwork and the smells of her wonderful cooking and baking.As a stark contrast we are introduced to Ellie as she is in jail, accused of killing her mother who had terminal cancer.When Kate was diagnosed, and it became clear that she did not have long to live, Ellie’s father George requests that she leave her successful career in the city, her flat and her boyfriend to move herself back home to care for her mother. The very gifted and successful daughter of an English professor and a dutiful housewife, she and her two brothers wanted for very little, other than more attention from their constantly occupied father and always busy mother.
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