Review: Family Tree by Susan Wiggs

Family Tree by Susan Wiggs
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, large print, audiobook
Pages: 368
Published by William Morrow on August 9th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

For readers of Kristin Hannah and Jodi Picoult comes a powerful, emotionally complex story of love, loss, the pain of the past—and the promise of the future.
Sometimes the greatest dream starts with the smallest element. A single cell, joining with another. And then dividing. And just like that, the world changes.
Annie Harlow knows how lucky she is. The producer of a popular television cooking show, she loves her handsome husband and the beautiful Manhattan home they share. And now, she’s pregnant with their first child.
But in an instant, her life is shattered. And when Annie awakes from a year-long coma, she discovers that time isn’t the only thing she's lost.
Grieving and wounded, Annie retreats to her old family home in Switchback, Vermont, a maple farm generations old. There, surrounded by her free-spirited brother, their divorced mother, and four young nieces and nephews, Annie slowly emerges into a world she left behind years ago: the town where she grew up, the people she knew before, the high-school boyfriend turned ex-cop. And with the discovery of a cookbook her grandmother wrote in the distant past, Annie unearths an age-old mystery that might prove the salvation of the family farm.
Family Tree is the story of one woman’s triumph over betrayal, and how she eventually comes to terms with her past. It is the story of joys unrealized and opportunities regained. Complex, clear-eyed and big-hearted, funny, sad, and wise, it is a novel to cherish and to remember.

My Review:

I read this yesterday in one gloriously delicious reading binge – which seems totally appropriate considering the amount of absolutely yummy cooking that occurs within the pages this book. I couldn’t put this one down because the story is excellent.

This is a story about starting over. Annie Rush is the fortunate or unfortunate recipient of the universe’s biggest do-over. After a tragic accident, Annie miraculously wakes up from a year-long coma to discover that whoever she was, she isn’t that person anymore. And that she’ll have to figure out how much of that person she used to be she either wants to, or even can, incorporate into the person she has become.

Robert Frost famously said that “home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Annie goes home. Or to be more accurate, Annie gets shipped home, while she is still in that coma. Her husband, star of a Hollywood cooking show that Annie conceived and produced, cuts his losses and divorces her while she is so far out of it that the organ harvesting vultures are circling.

But Annie survives. And she wakes up, a bit like the patients in the Robin Williams’ movie Awakenings, to find out that the world has gone on without her. She has to run to catch up. But first she has to learn to run, and even to walk, again.

Even though she doesn’t yet remember the recent events of her life, her past in Switchback Vermont at her family’s maple sugaring farm Sugar Rush, her first love, and the love of cooking that she inherited from her Grandmother, are very much at the front of her mind.

But she has to figure out who she wants to be when she grows up all over again. And to do that, she has to remember everything that went into making her the person she had been before the accident. Even the betrayals.

In order to have the future she always wanted, Annie first has to deal with the past. She has a second chance, and this time she’s going to get it right. And hang on to it.

Escape Rating A: This book is a bit too big to read in one sitting, but I did read it in one afternoon/evening/night marathon. We all have things in our lives we would like to do over, and this is a marvelous story about second chances.

As Annie examines her old life, as the memories come back to her in bits, she is able to see what happened, where things went right, where they went wrong, where she drifted, and where she lost her way.

On the one hand, her ex was an absolute bastard for divorcing her while she was in a coma. On the other hand, the Annie who woke up was much, much better off without his lying, cheating ass. That part of Annie’s healing is to get her own back from this arsehole will make readers stand up and cheer. It’s always fun when a slimeball gets its just desserts.

But the real story is Annie’s building a new life by figuring out which parts of the old life were important, and which were just eddies in life’s current that she had drifted into by accident or mistake. She also wakes up with a much more realistic, if slightly cynical, view of the world and those who people her world. The new Annie feels more thoughtful, and more interesting, than the old Annie.

There’s a love story here as well. One of the big things that Annie gets to do over is a second chance with her first love. We see them in Annie’s memories, both very young, very much in love, but not certain of themselves or each other. They lose each other along the way, through a series of unfortunate accidents and absolutely terrible timing. Now they are both adults, and they have a bit better chance at figuring out what is really important and what can be worked around. And they still almost blow it again.

That they finally, finally don’t is what gives this story its beautiful happy ending.

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