Book Review and Tour: Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

Title: Labor Day
Author: Joyce Maynard
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition
Publication Date: August 3, 2010
Paperback: 272 pages
ISBN: 978-0061843419
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

The dog days of August . . . All summer long, thirteen-year-old Henry kept hoping that something different would happen, but it never did.

Then, just as the Labor Day weekend gets under way, in the Pricemart where Henry?s mother, Adele, on one of her rare forays out of the house and into the wider world has taken him to buy pants for school, a bleeding man approaches Henry and asks for help.

Frank is a man with a secret, and a man on the run. Adele is a wounded soul whose dreams of family life and romantic dancing died years ago, even before her husband left her and their son. And Henry is a “loser” and a loner, a boy on the cusp of manhood who, over the next five days, will learn some of life?s most valuable lessons: how to throw a baseball, the secret to perfect peach pie, and the importance of placing others–especially those you love–above yourself.

My Review:

Thirteen-year-old Henry and his mother Adele meet Frank Chambers in Pricemart and bring him back to their home, beginning 6 days that change the course of several lives in the novel Labor Day by Joyce Maynard.  Henry narrates the story giving the reader insights into his life prior to meeting Frank, the life changing six days of Labor Day weekend of his 13th year and then Henry jumps forward in time eventually bringing the reader to present day, two decades later with the lessons he has learned and .  The characters are richly detailed from Henry’s eccentric and possibly unbalanced mother Adele, his remarried father Richard, his step-mother Marjorie, his half-sister Chloe, Eleanor, and naturally Frank.  While the story line may appear far-fetched, it is after all a story and quite a loving, heart-warming and endearing one.  Frank worked his way into my heart, even if he was an escaped convict. Maynard takes the reader into the life of a thirteen-year-old boy living in Holton Mills, New Hampshire and shares what has to be one of the most circumstantially bizarre yet wonderfully profound holiday weekends I have ever read about.  Labor Day is a quick read filled with hope, family and love and one I enjoyed and would recommend to others looking for a light yet beautiful novel of how one act could impact the lives of so many people.

About the Author:

Joyce Maynard first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” in 1973, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in more than fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR. Her writing has also been published in national magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine; Newsweek; The New York Times Magazine; Forbes; Salon; San Francisco Magazine, USA Weekly; and many more. She has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose, and on Fresh Air. Essays of hers appear in numerous collections. She has been a fellow at Yaddo, UCross, and The MacDowell Colony, where she wrote her most recently published novel, Labor Day.

The author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel To Die For (in which she also plays the role of Nicole Kidman’s attorney) and the bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, Maynard makes her home in Mill Valley, California. Her novel, The Usual Rules—a story about surviving loss—has been a favorite of book club audiences of all ages, and was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the ten best books for young readers for 2003.

Joyce Maynard also runs the Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in Guatemala, founded in 2002.
Additional information about the author:

Joyce’s website.
Join Joyce’s mailing list.
Joyce Maynard will be on Blog Talk Radio with Book Club Girl on August 30th at 7:00pm EDT.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the book tour.

I received a complimentary copy of Labor Day by Joyce Maynard from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.