Nest by Esther Ehrlich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I got an advance copy of this book through NetGalley. It was written by a fellow Vassar grad and I had just returned from the Cape with the kids, so maybe I was hoping to rekindle some of the magic.
I thought this was an excellent book — Ms. Ehrlich drew the various relationships that intertwined and grew and changed throughout the story very well. At the end of it all you felt like you’d been on quite the journey with these folks.
The narrator’s voice was strong, not too naive and the author did an excellent job of respecting the reader, be they an adult or the middle-grader (at whom the book is pitched). The only time and only quibble I had with the book was the incessant beating of the 1972 drum — for a brief span it distracted me, the constant references to bell bottoms, to “the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel work in a chocolate factory,” the lava lamps, and President Nixon. But that was the only flat note for me and maybe it’s more of an instructive history lesson for younger readers. Otherwise the setting, local color, emotional ups and downs and worries of a young kid were all so well done.
There was one scene in the book where Rachel, the older daughter, sees her mom, who’s been suffering from the serious disease mentioned in the book description, after some time and the daughter’s “voice is slow and shaky, like she’s afraid she has the wrong answer to a math problem.” I thought that was a wonderful way of couching an emotional reaction in the younger sister’s language of stress and worry.
Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read “A Bridge to Terabithia,” one of my favorite books as a kid, but I did find myself thinking about that book, wanting to go back and see if it was just as poignant and powerful as I remember it being, while I read this one. I’ll have to let you know how that comparison goes if I do go back to it, but this story stands well on its own right.