She Treads Softly: Welcome Home, Stranger

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Welcome Home, Stranger

Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Christensen
12/5/23; 224 pages
HarperCollins

Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Christensen is a recommended family drama.

Rachel Callowy, an environmental journalist in Washington, DC, and self-professed “middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic,” is going home to Maine after the death of her mother. Lucie was a very difficult mother, to put it mildly, and Rachel was estranged from her for the last ten years. Her wealthy sister Celeste was left to care for Lucie through cancer treatments. Celeste is upset and angry at Rachel and this presents itself as a lot of passive-aggressive behavior.

While Rachel is already handling living with an ex-husband and his boyfriend in their condo, and a boss who wants to fire her, now she has a pile of other problems. A longtime friend/lover, David, lives next door to Celeste with his new wife, but he still wants Rachel. She inherited her mother's house which needs work. Celeste has issues of her own she is dealing with, an alcoholic husband, distant teens, and loads of resentment.

Characters are portrayed as realistic individuals. Rachel is fully realized and complex as is Celeste. Lucie is examined and exposed as an especially flawed character. A novel only handling the complicated and unhealthy parenting of Lucie and the effects on her daughters would be a heavy enough focus for a short narrative.

Welcome Home, Stranger is a beautifully written novel about the complications of family, grief, growing older, and reexamining your past. However, it also covers so many emotionally laden topics in so few pages that nothing seems to reach any satisfying resolution, which is unfortunate. Just a few of Rachel's problems would be enough to cover in one abbreviated novel. The other option would be to extend the narrative and fully cover all the issues.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins via Edelweiss.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.