Good Family

In Good Family, Terry Gamble delivers the complex and often tortured relationships we have with those we are closest to in the way that the best of writers do. The fascinating characters in this novel are delivered in lovely prose, and the old-moneyed family lake house setting is rich and evocative. I just loved this book!

Terry Gamble has written a hauntingly beautiful, lyrical book. We follow Maddie returning to her family's summer home after a long estrangement. As her mother's health fails and her siblings & cousins gather, Maddie grapples with the family "ghosts", her memories of summers goneby, her failed marriage and uncertain direction. This is a story about death & re-birth, the strength & frailty of family ties, pathos & ultimately, redemption. It is a funny, rich, multi-layered tale. A treasure.

Thank you, Terry Gamble, for this wonderful book. The first sentence blows you away and then it keeps getting better. This is a great summer read, or if you want to feel summer, because she totally captures that rather aimless, warm, sandy, good-eating, kind of sun-burned feeling of gathering with your family by the lake. But it's so much more. The characters--the mother dying in an upstairs room while below her life teems, Maddie's rather eccentric cousins and their families, Ian, the gay Lutheran addict from Minnesota! Loved Ian! The house itself is a character with its ancestor ghosts. I loved Maddie and her journey and Gamble writes so evocatively, that it's hard to put the book down. Her descriptions of Maddie`s new baby, and the love she feels for her, are some of the best I've ever read. A beautiful, beautiful book.

This was my most favorite novel that I read all year. I still miss the characters, especially Maddie and Ian, and marvel at this author's ability to capture such a wonderful sense of place. I wish they'd make a movie of it!

In depth character development warrant this novel 5 stars. Although there isn't a lot of action, it doesn't matter because the characters are so compelling. Gamble's beautiful prose draws you into the family and you feel like you are a fly on the wall in the big old summer cottage on the lake. I too grew up in northern Michigan and still spend my summers there, and the author captures the up north appeal completely. I've read a lot of books this summer, and this is one of the best.