The Blessings

"It's about these contradictions...having this identity as part of a big family but also this part of yourself that's separate, dealing with your own private stuff, that they never really know. Or dealing with the same stuff, just differently."The Blessings are a large Irish Catholic family living in the Philadelphia area. Elise Juska's novel of linked chapters gives a glimpse of many of the members of this family as they deal with happiness, struggles, and tragedies—namely the death of the family patriarch and the untimely death of the oldest son. The book progresses in linear fashion through time and follows several generations of the family, from the matriarch, Helen, forced to confront grief after the deaths of both her husband and her son, John, to Helen's three surviving children and John's young widow, Lauren, to a number of Helen's grandchildren as they grow into adulthood.These are stories of the bonds that tie us together and the unspoken hurts and petty thoughts that tear us apart. These are stories about the fulfillment of dreams and the realization that not all you've hoped for will come to fruition. You get the opportunity to experience the lives of these people alongside of them, with, in some cases, a little more knowledge about what's going to happen to them than they have."You hear how people's priorities change and eventually they go back to where they came from, like some kind of homing instinct. And you think it won't happen to you, but then something changes, and there you are."I found The Blessings to be a compelling and well-drawn portrait of a family drawn together in times of happiness and sadness. I'll admit, however, that although each chapter had overlapping characters and situations, it didn't feel like one novel, but more like a collection of linked stories. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)Juska did a terrific job in imbuing her characters with unique personalities, so I had no problem keeping each of them straight even as some of them married and gave birth to their own children. As with any novel-in-chapters, some of the stories are more interesting than others, but on the whole, this is a tremendously interesting look at one family's ups and downs, and it definitely makes you look at your own family in a different light.

I had been hearing some positive things about this book around the library and so I decided to give it a read, not knowing what to really expect. It wound up being a very relatable and enjoyable book. There isn't really much by way of a plot, rather each chapter winds up being basically a short story about one member of a very close, extended Irish Catholic Philadelphia family over the course of several decades. They are all connected, and so answers that aren't necessarily provided during the course of one person's "story" wind up being provided during someone else's. Each character is both different enough from the others and fully fleshed-out enough to keep things interesting, and the choice to follow different people in each chapter makes it hard to guess where things may be heading next. There are certainly some surprises in store for members of the family throughout. Growing up with a large family that was very close makes many of the moments immediately resonate with me, and some of the problems faced throughout the course of the novel strike close to home as well. Still, the aforementioned lack of plot makes it feel somewhat uneventful when all is said and done. The Blessings do wind up being a great cast of characters though, and the family's unwavering love for and faith in each other no matter how much life throws at them is a joy to behold, and that alone makes this one of the better works of fiction you might run across this Summer.[I originally posted this review on GoodReads]

I really liked this long book.but was unable to finish it because I had so many things going on and would lose track of who was who. If my memory serves me correctly, I started it in the winter, when I really like to read but got busy and had to leave it because I wanted to read "1776." I am also a writer so I needed to do writing of my own for my writing group. However, as a fellow writer (I wrote the book: "You Are A Beautiful Angel Sent From God." Please check it out on Amazon.com or IUniverse.com. So far I am my favorite writer but my book's chapters are two to three pages long and they always start with a new story about my life. You don't have to remember who is who. You just have to remember me. That being said, I feel this is a gifted writer who skillfully draws us into her characters and their descendants for generations. I would like to know how it ends, if it does ever end. I would like to see more from this author but maybe have it way shorter and about the same family. If she could use the prologue to bring new and old readers up to speed. I, personally read so many books, I don't remember each one but I do remember authors I like. Jackie Jones

Elise Juska's third novel is a family saga covering the lives of a large number of the Blessing family, following the deaths of the patriarch John Blessing and his son, also called John. It is in part an observation of how the family cope with John Junior's early death, and in part a record of routine life in a large Irish-American family. Each chapter is told from the point of view of another family member, and deals with their own personal concerns. So, for example, in the first chapter we have Abby Blessing trying to make a new life for herself at college (in Boston, I think) away from the family home in Philadelphia, but still feeling the lure of family. Then we have John Junior's widow Lauren trying to cope with bringing up three children, one of whom is still very small. As the novel progresses more and more family voices come in. There is Dave, John's brother, worried about his daughter's anorexia. Kate Blessing, John's sister-in-law, wants a baby; when she eventually gets one, her husband nearly cracks under the strain of child care, his work as a doctor and Kate's lack of domestica. John Blessing senior's wife has to go into a care home; John Blessing senior's bright grandson Alex resents the upper middle-class assumptions of his college girlfriend Rebecca during a holiday in Spain; another of his grandsons takes to petty crime. Dave's wife gets a divorce. And so on, and so on, culminating in a chapter told from the point of view of John Blessing junior's daughter Elena as she returns home to see her family as an adult.I didn't get on with Juska's previous two books at all (I stupidly bought three together rather than testing them out one by one) but thought this an immense improvement - it's thoughtful, quite elegantly written and can at times be beautiful. There are some memorable and convincing voices in it, particularly Abby, the college girl torn between home and the desire to have her own adventures, and the courageous Lauren. There's some lovely descriptions too, above all in the chapter set in Spain, and some interesting meditations on family, and what binds family members together (or in the case of Dave and his wife Ann tears the family structure apart). So - a pleasant read all in all.But I also found it a rather bitty and frustrating one. The novel is short, there are a lot of different viewpoints, and Juska hasn't really worked out a central narrative thread - or who the most important characters are. So in the end it feels like a lot of fragmentary short stories that don't really go anywhere much, and that all end rather abruptly. I assumed from the blurb that the novel was about a family coming to terms with the death of a key member - but in fact, John Blessing senior hardly features after his death in Chapter 1, and John Blessing junior fades out of the narrative quite quickly, becoming a rather vague, ghostly figure. A lot of the stories don't really seem associated with the deaths of either of the men - they're just observations of bits of daily life in a (rather ordinary) Irish Catholic family. And some of the stories seem very peremptory or only half-finished. We never learn, for example, what really prompts Dave and Ann to split up - and after a moving chapter on Dave's love for his daughter he just disappears from the story. Nor do we find out why Megan became anorexic, or whether Lauren will repeat her unsuccessful attempt at internet dating (or whether she's decided that John was simply the only man for her). There's also a rather cloying sense throughout - which doesn't entirely figure as the Blessings don't seem a particularly special or even warm family - that 'home is where the heart is' and that it's a Bad Thing for any Blessing member to want to move far from the family circle. This particularly came across in the scenes with Alex and Rebecca which I thought were a rather horrid example of inverted snobbery (Rebecca, it is implied, is a 'bad girlfriend' for Alex because she likes European culture and travel rather than being a homely domestic sort, and because her family travel and have money). In the end I found myself wishing that the author had concentrated more on John Blessing (junior above all) and the effect he and his death had had on his family, rather than branching off into a lot of rather random stories about the Blessing clan.Not a book I'd revisit, then, and in the end a bit bland - but certainly much better than Juska's previous, and one that might encourage me to try her later works at some point.

I enjoyed the story told through the different generations of the family, but the ending was boring and flat. I was left with the feeling, is that all there is?