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COUNT THE WAYS

by Joyce Maynard ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2021

Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with.

Since she was once a homeless orphan, Eleanor's chaotic, joyous family and farm mean everything to her. And then....

How much pain and loss can one person take? How can you end up evicted from a world you built yourself? How can doing the right thing backfire totally? In her 10th novel, Maynard vividly imagines a scenario that answers these questions with hard-won wisdom, patiently leading her protagonist and her readers through the valley of bitterness and isolation to what lies on the other side. When she is just 16, Eleanor's alcoholic, self-involved parents are killed in a car crash. At boarding school, she comforts herself by creating picture books about an orphan who travels the world; these sell to a publisher, and by the time she's a sophomore in college, she has enough money to drop out, drive into the countryside, and buy a farm. "It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived," she thinks. If you build it, they will come—right? Nonetheless, several years go by in solitude, and not without additional tragedy. At last, she meets Cam, the handsome, redheaded woodworker who will give her three children they both adore. But even as Eleanor revels in motherhood with every cell of her being, her glue gun, and her pie pan, she knows fate cannot be trusted. "If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn't survive," she tells her husband. Could loving her children too much be her downfall? she worries. When an accident that her husband could have prevented changes their lives, she will find out. She will find out how, in your grief, you can drive away the people you love most. And she will find out, slowly, what you can do about that. The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily.

Pub Date: May 25, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-06-239827-7

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colleen Hoover

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Colleen Hoover Is Back. Let the BookTokking Begin

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Colleen Hoover Dominated Book Sales in 2022

HERE ONE MOMENT

by Liane Moriarty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2024

A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.

What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?

In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024

ISBN: 9780593798607

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

GENERAL FICTION | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER

More by Liane Moriarty

by Liane Moriarty

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The Literary Edit

Count the Ways Book Review

I have loved Joyce Maynard’s writing ever since I read Labour Day, many moons ago – and remember it fondly as being one of the first books I was sent to review as a book blogger. I since went on to read many of her other books – At Home in the World ; which I bought while in London, ahead of attending her memoir writing retreat in Guatemala , Under the Influence; a present from my ex-boyfriend that he bought me from a bookshop in Venice Beach on our one-year anniversary; After Her , which I read while on a long weekend in Byron Bay, and The Best of Us – a book that made me cry ugly, endless, infinite tears while I was home alone at my apartment in North Hollywood. I vividly remember reading – and loving – each of them, and so was overjoyed when Joyce announced that she was working on a new book while sequestered at her home on Lake Atitlan during the beginning of the pandemic.

After a failed attempt to get an advanced copy from the US, my local bookshop in Bondi ordered it in for me, and while I had made a solid list of the books I wanted to get through during July; as soon as my copy arrived, all other books were swiftly moved to the side to make way for Count the Ways, Joyce’s tenth book.

There are few writers that grip me in the way that Joyce does. Usually, when I’m reading, however much I love a book, I find it near-impossible to read for more than twenty minutes at a time without checking my phone (for what, Lord knows – it’s a habit I’ve picked up that I loathe beyond words). And, yet, when I was reading Count the Ways, I struggled to tear myself away from it. I was torn between racing through it in a single sitting and savouring it so it would last. In the end I read it over four days – my to-do list thrown by the wayside, my step count dwindling; my phone ignored (thank God) as I was reminded of the unaltered joy of leaving the world behind and losing myself in the pages of a book.

I’ve spoken before about how Joyce’s sense of setting is second to none, and in Count the Ways I was reminded exactly why I love her writing. As a reader I was transported to the New Hampshire farm that forms the backdrop of much of the story, and is as much of a character as the family that lie therein.

A story about love, marriage, parenting, infidelity, art and forgiveness, Count the Ways is an epic family saga that follows the lives of Eleanor and Cam all the way from their first meeting, through to their blossoming romance onto their child-rearing years and eventually the demise of their relationship, in the wake of a tragedy that shook the family to its very core.

I loved the family, rich with nuances and complexities; I loved the nostalgia that was seamlessly woven through the story, I loved the layered characters and the way in which Joyce portrayed the well-loved farmhouse as a character in and of itself, filled with chaos and laughter and joy, until one day it wasn’t. An ambitious and flawless tale about an imperfect family and their mistakes and wrongdoings; Count the Ways is an evocative saga about love and about loss and about the redemptive power of forgiveness. As with every one of Joyce’s books I’ve read, it’s a tale that I will press into the hands of everyone I can, and one whose power and poignancy I will remember for a long time to come.

Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard Summary

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard takes on the story of a family from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and its costly aftermath—to illuminate how the mistakes of parents are passed down through generations to fester, or to be healed.

After falling in love in the last years of the 1970s, Eleanor and Cam follow their dream of raising three children on a New Hampshire farm. Theirs is a seemingly idyllic life of summer softball games and Labor Day cookouts, snow days and skating on the pond. But when a tragic accident permanently injures the family’s youngest child, Eleanor blames Cam. Her inability to forgive him leads to a devastating betrayal: an affair with the family babysitter that brings about the end of their marriage.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family—and the many others who make up their world—make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. As we follow the family from the days of illegal abortion and the draft through the early computer age, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS epidemic, the early awakenings of the #MeToo era, and beyond, through the gender transition of one of the children and another’s choice to cease communication with her mother, we witness a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in the face of unanticipated disaster.

With endearingly flawed characters and a keen eye for detail, Joyce Maynard transforms the territory she knows best—home, family, parenthood, love, and loss—into the stuff of a page-turning thriller. In this achingly beautiful novel, she reminds us how great sorrow and great joy may coexist—and frequently do.

Buy Count the Ways from Bookshop.org , Book Depository , Waterstones , Amazon or Amazon AU .

Joyce Maynard Author Bio

Joyce Maynard is the author of seven previous novels, including To Die For, Labor Day, and The Good Daughters, and four books of nonfiction. Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages. Maynard’s bestselling novel Labor Day was adapted for film by Academy Award-nominated director Jason Reitman and stars Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. Maynard makes her home in California.

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The author of many 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.

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2 comments on “Count the Ways Book Review”

I LOVED this review. I read it as I was tearing myself away from the last few pages of the book in response to the demand of my dog that she be fed! I knew of Maynard, for sure, but never read any of her books. I am consumed by this book. I feel like I actually lived her life, she is so spot on with her insights and comments. thanks for your wonderful review of her work- I look forward to reading more of her work. it helped that I lived in southern NH for many years!

Hi Suzanne, I am so happy to hear that – I absolutely adore all of Joyce’s books. I’ve never been to New Hampshire but she does such an incredible job of describing it in her books. Other books of hers I love are Under the Influence and The Best of Us (but be sure you have tissues ready for this one!) xo

Book Summary and Reviews of Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard

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Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

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Book summary.

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family - from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives.

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She's an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam's softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don't make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family. Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam's negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner. Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another's choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours. A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

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Reader reviews.

"The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily. Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Sensitively plumbing the complexity of human emotions, of love and forgiveness, [Maynard] draws readers into a deep, aching attachment to her characters, creating an ultimately hopeful tale just right for this moment." - Booklist (starred review) "Maynard shows her mastery at pulling the heartstrings...Granted, the many side plots start to feel contrived once they're added up...but Maynard does a good job of developing Eleanor, making the perspective she gains over the course of her life feel fully earned. Despite the melodrama, Maynard succeeds at pulling in the reader." - Publishers Weekly "How did Maynard know that this is exactly the book we all need now? This exhilaratingly brilliant novel isn't just an indelible story of the falling dominoes of a family struggling through crisis and through generations, it's also about the times we live through...This gorgeous story reminds us that love is always, always worth it." - Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You "Joyce Maynard is the queen of the family saga, and Count the Ways is the best! Instantly addicting, the story of Eleanor, Cam, and their children pulls you in and wraps itself around you like an heirloom quilt made of familiarity, intimacy, and the orchestral complexity of loving the people closest to us. This is the novel you'll be longing to return to at the end of every day and one you will re-read for years to come." - Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

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Joyce Maynard Author Biography

new york times book review count the ways

Joyce Maynard is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column, "Domestic Affairs." Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World , has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Maynard divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.

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Count the Ways: A Novel

By Joyce Maynard

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family--from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives

Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam's negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives--through the gender transition of one child and another's choice to completely break with her mother--Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

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Average rating: 7

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A graphic novel-style illustration shows J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (from behind) deep in conversation as they walk together down a narrow, lamp-lit cobblestone street at Oxford. The tall, thin Tolkien, on the left, wears a trench coat, and books and papers are tucked under his left arm; his head is turned toward Lewis and his right hand is raised as if to make a point. The stockier Lewis, also carrying books, wears a slightly shorter jacket and appears to be listening. The two men’s shadows, trailing behind them, as well as the buildings in their wake, are slate blue; the path ahead is light purple and the sky is gold, like the lamps lighting their way forward.

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How Tolkien and Lewis Re-enchanted a War-Weary World

A graphic novel makes a powerful case that if these two men had never met, 20th-century pop culture might have taken an entirely different course.

From “The Mythmakers.” Credit... John Hendrix

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By Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman is the author, most recently, of “The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur.”

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THE MYTHMAKERS: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien , by John Hendrix

I go back and forth as to whether it’s a gob-smacking coincidence or incredibly overdetermined that two of the principal architects of the modern fantasy tradition, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, not only taught at Oxford together, but also were close friends for two decades. Lewis himself seems to have found this fact startling. “Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life,” he wrote, “than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.” The complex and not untroubled creative friendship between Jack (as Lewis was known to friends) and Tollers (as Lewis tweedily called Tolkien) is the subject of a fascinating new graphic novel by John Hendrix called “The Mythmakers.” It’s a biographical study, but it’s less about the men in question than it is about the creative spark that flickered between them, flared brightly and finally went out.

Tolkien was the elder by six years. He was born in South Africa and grew up in England, near Birmingham. Lewis spent his childhood in Belfast. Both lost their mothers when they were still boys. Both had an early passion for Northern European stories and mythology (Norse, Finnish, Germanic). Tolkien was raised with a powerful Christian faith that never deserted him. Lewis lost his belief in God during a stint at a boarding school that was ghastly even by British standards. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary,” he later wrote. “Nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” He hadn’t seen anything yet.

Both Lewis and Tolkien served in World War I and endured some of the worst fighting on the Western Front. Each consoled himself in his own characteristic way: Lewis wrote poems cursing God; Tolkien wrote a poem about angels in a language he invented. Both had the relative good luck to be invalided out of the action and wind up back at Oxford.

Lewis’s first impression of Tolkien was famously underwhelming: “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,” he wrote in his diary. “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” Lewis himself was not smooth — he was rumpled, red-faced and loud — but the two men bonded over their love of all things mythological and medieval. Tolkien was already assembling the vast home-brewed mythology out of which his best-known works would grow, but he was such a perfectionist, and so personally guarded, that he hadn’t shown it to anybody yet. Lewis was struggling with disenchantment and disillusion, searching for some kind of joy and meaning that would feel like more than childish fancy. “The fellowship of Tolkien and Lewis had brought them to the cusp of the most fruitful period of their lives,” Hendrix writes. “Each had the right key. The door was cracked open. It was time to pass through — together.”

Separate side-by-side lavender-tinted photos set against a gold background show Lewis and Tolkien, later in their lives, facing toward each other. Lewis, indoors, is smiling and appears to be talking. Tolkien, outdoors with a scarf around his neck, is smoking a pipe, and also smiling.

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Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds

The best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe.

A many-faced purple figure reading a book

A whole world can exist within a single brain. But the boundaries between one mind and the next are usually unbreachable—except in fiction. A writer’s task is to bridge the gap between their reader’s experience and the consciousness of their characters so well that the audience intimately understands the world their protagonists live in, even if that world is utterly fantastical. No matter the setting, the best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe entirely. These sites may at first feel unknowable or overtly strange, because they reflect perspectives radically unlike our own. Yet, through the intervention of fiction, we may come to recognize them, even understand them—although what feels concrete and certain to you may feel porous and surreal to someone else.

This feeling of encountering another world is multifaceted. It can be an imaginary place or a glimpse of another reality. It may also simply exist in the tension between comfort and estrangement. The books on the list below dream up another world by acknowledging that fantasy is a state of mind, and even the most outlandish invention is anchored in some aspect of reality as we know it. Each pulls us out of our comfortable understanding of our surroundings, in ways both joyful and unsettling. Read any of these five titles before you go to sleep, and you’ll soon find yourself somewhere else, at least for a time.

Pale Fire , by Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps the most effervescent and elegiacal of Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire famously consists of a long poem written by John Shade, an English professor at a small fictional college, which is explicated in extensive endnotes by his new neighbor and self-proclaimed close friend Charles Kinbote, who has come to rural Appalachia from a country he calls Zembla. The poem itself conjures up hints and glimpses of a place after death, while Kinbote’s ongoing commentary builds up a rich and detailed story about an exiled king, an assassination plot, and an unknown European land. But Kinbote’s references and allusions, over time, become more and more unreliable, and the shape of the novel reminds us that what we think of the truth is at times completely dependent on whose perspective shapes our view of events. Pale Fire opens out beyond its central verse into a wider space that asks us to decide what is fantasy, what is fact, and whose reality to live within.

Primeval and Other Times , by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In a series of interwoven vignettes that roam from character to character, the fearless Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk explores how folklore, ritual, and strife shape the minds of the inhabitants of a village appropriately called Primeval, over a long period starting in 1914. Dreamlike and yet viscerally real, the book feels like what you might recall in that space between sleep and wakefulness, when people are more in touch with otherwise-hidden instincts and emotions; meanwhile, the roving from one point of view to another recalls the technique of the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The author touches on key events in 20th-century Polish history while also introducing unreal phenomena, such as archangels who watch over the village and seem truly alien. You may never know what it was really like to live in a village in Poland during the period in question, but in Tokarczuk’s skillful hands you receive something both more intimate and more fulfilling: an understanding of the life of the mind in a different time.

Read: The science fiction that came before science

Brodeck , by Philippe Claudel, translated by John Cullen

The past is another country, as the famous saying goes. But novels can help us enter territories otherwise closed off to us. In Brodeck , a stranger arrives in a remote French village in the mountains, disturbing the everyday existence of its inhabitants, who have secrets to hide. Brodeck, a nature wanderer who has himself returned to the village after time away, then assembles a “report” on the clash between the world the stranger brings to the villagers and the world they try to force him to accept—a disconnect that creates a dramatic, tragic conflict between the past and the present. But Brodeck’s own experiences outside the community begin to influence the telling of the tale. As the stranger suffers from the clash of two crucially different views of reality, the report becomes an indictment and a record of human folly with political undertones. By the end, Claudel’s novel is a heartbreaking and stunning work of fiction about provincialism and secrets that I think about frequently, unable to escape the unknowable place it documents in such meticulous yet compassionate detail.

The Ravicka novels, by Renee Gladman

In understated prose, Gladman’s dispatches from an imaginary city-state remake the very idea of architecture into a new concept. One of the four books in the series, Houses of Ravicka , chronicles the quest of the city comptroller to find a house that has disappeared from its set location, while an invisible house begins to appear elsewhere. Similarly, other stories set in Ravicka address odd physics, ritual, logic, and illogic in peculiar ways that nevertheless feel modern and relevant. In a sense, Gladman defamiliarizes our world to show us how it works, and her novels wrench this kind of fantastical fiction into the 21st century by referencing the mundane municipal roles often left out of other works. It’s no wonder, then, that her exploration of Ravicka has spilled into her nonfiction and visual art, because the sociological and philosophical questions she poses feel as if they require expression in other media as well.

Read: One of the best fantasy novels ever is nothing like The Lord of the Rings

Dark Matter , by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson

A work of phantasmagorical, erotic, postapocalyptic unease by one of Sweden’s most important poets, Dark Matter exists in a nightmare state that entangles nature and the pollution of human-built environments in unsettling ways. A hybrid composition of prose and poetry, the book has a tactile quality that colonizes you without mercy. “I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths,” Berg writes, the terrain fusing with the speaker’s body. “I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.” Despite the way Berg implicates the reader in what amounts to body horror, by some alchemy she ends up transforming the reader’s initial fright into feelings of febrile fascination. Berg pulls in string theory, folklore, references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , and what appear to be H. R. Giger–esque flourishes, meshing them with a contaminated yet still powerful view of nature. There is no way to describe this trenchant, uncompromising view of a transformed landscape other than to continue to quote from it: “But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me.” This is the ultimate other world, created from broken pieces of our own.

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Count the Ways: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 13, 2021

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.

Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

Print length 464 pages
Language English
Publisher William Morrow
Publication date July 13, 2021
Dimensions 6 x 1.41 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 006239827X
ISBN-13 978-0062398277
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

“A fearlessly candid, heartrendingly forthright examination of the joys and terrors of family life from the perspective of a woman of unusual sensitivity and empathy, Count the Ways takes us on a memorable journey.” — Joyce Carol Oates

"Cut[s] across moments of national and personal upheaval to examine the complex web of family against the backdrop of history." — New York Times Book Review

"Wonderfully absorbing, precise and emotionally astute . . .I was moved by the characters' ambivalences, their misgivings, their anger, but most of all by their complex and fascinating love." — Marisa Silver, New York Times bestselling author of The Mysteries

"Sensitively plumbing the complexity of human emotions, of love and forgiveness, [Maynard] draws readers into a deep, aching attachment to her characters, creating an ultimately hopeful tale just right for this moment." — Booklist (starred review)

"The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all. . . Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Readers will sink into Maynard’s masterful portrait of one woman’s life in this decades-spanning family saga.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“How did Maynard know that this is exactly the book we all need now? This exhilaratingly brilliant novel isn’t just an indelible story of the falling dominoes of a family struggling through crisis and through generations, it’s also about the times we live through. . . . This gorgeous story reminds us that love is always, always worth it.” — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You

“Joyce Maynard is the queen of the family saga, and Count the Ways is the best! Instantly addicting, the story of Eleanor, Cam, and their children pulls you in and wraps itself around you like an heirloom quilt made of familiarity, intimacy, and the orchestral complexity of loving the people closest to us. This is the novel you’ll be longing to return to at the end of every day and one you will re-read for years to come.” — Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

“ Count the Ways is the book you will want to curl up in a chair and read from beginning to end. It’s rich and complex, beautiful and heartbreaking, just like life. Reading about this flawed and lovely family will make you want to hug your own flawed and lovely family tight. Joyce Maynard celebrates the messy, wonderful thing that is love." — Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and The Book That Matters Most

“ Count the Ways is an extraordinarily generous invitation into a woman’s intimate life, from the loneliness of her youth to the earned wisdom of middle age. In this richly imagined novel, Maynard never flinches as she portrays both quiet successes and heartbreaking failures at love, marriage, and motherhood. This is the work of one of our great storytellers.” — Meredith Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Beneficence

“My to-do list had umpteen items on it, but I let them all go to hell as I tore through Joyce Maynard’s latest page-turner. . . . To-do list? What to-do list? Under the Influence is a riveting read.” — New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb on Under the Influence

“Joyce Maynard has, again, managed to tap flawlessly into the voice of a teenage girl: part hope, part fiction, and all heart. After Her is page-turning mystery, wrapped in a beautifully rendered story of sisterhood; and reading it is a journey through one’s own memory of what it meant to be thirteen, when the world was equally terrifying and fascinating. Books this compelling just don’t come around very often.” — Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author on After Her

About the Author

Joyce Maynard is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column, “Domestic Affairs.” Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World , has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Maynard divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow (July 13, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006239827X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062398277
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.41 x 9 inches
#1,920 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
#2,975 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
#9,040 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Joyce maynard.

A native of New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life”, in 1972, 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 over fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more, and a longtime performer with The Moth.

Maynard is the author of seventeen books, including the novel To Die For and the best-selling memoir, At Home in the World—translated into sixteen languages. Her novel, To Die For was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry for a film directed by Gus Van Sant , in which Joyce can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman’s lawyer.. Her novel Labor Day was adapted and directed by Jason Reitman for a film starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, to whom Joyce offered instruction for making the pie that appeared in a crucial scene in the film.

The mother of three grown children, Maynard runs workshops in memoir at her home in Lafayette California. In 2002 she founded The Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where she hosts a weeklong workshop in personal storytelling every winter.

She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

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Customers say

Customers find the book great, enjoyable, and compelling. They describe the story as powerful, absorbing, and well-written. Readers praise the characters as well-developed and likeable. They find the insight profound, inspiring, and valuable. Additionally, they mention the book is strong and persevering. Opinions are mixed on the sadness, with some finding it heartbreaking and joyous, while others say it's frustratingly sad.

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Customers find the book great, enjoyable, and memorable. They say it's a wonderful, down-to-earth look at what life brings to us. Readers also mention that the characters will stay with them for a long time.

"...In sum, this was an engaging and thought-provoking book…one I will not soon forgot. I recommend to anyone who loves a good family saga...." Read more

"...I would have a hard time ranking them. All enjoyable !" Read more

"...seem to be an inordinate amount of tragedy in this book, but it is a compelling and worthwhile read." Read more

"...There's something in this book for everyone, making it a good option for reading groups and those wanting to discuss it...." Read more

Customers find the story compelling, incredible, and powerful. They describe it as a deeply absorbing family saga that takes them through different series of history. Readers also mention the journey of Eleanor is real, vivid, and palpable.

"...Joyce is an incredible storyteller . I was pulled into the story from the first chapter and read the book in just a few days...." Read more

"...While occasionally frustrating, this one-sided tactic made the story very realistic and believable...." Read more

"This book is a deeply absorbing family saga that I devoured in a few days, to the exclusion of nearly everything else...." Read more

"...The author's focused storytelling reveals Eleanor's inexperienced approach to reality, combining good intentions, wishful thinking, and life's..." Read more

Customers find the writing style well-written, compassionate, and relatable. They say the characters come across as realistic and real. Readers also mention the story is rich in detail and heartfelt.

"...Maynard is a beautiful writer and she pens a nuanced saga...." Read more

"... It's relatable because the characters come across so realistic and real and their is diversity representing family life that I know and experience..." Read more

"...This is a well-written book that is complex and enthralling...." Read more

"I enjoyed this book so much because it is so well written . People's lives have so much joy and sorrow...." Read more

Customers find the characters well-developed and likeable. They say they have deep empathy for many of the characters.

"I loved this book. The characters are so real to me I feel like they live down the road! Joyce is an incredible storyteller...." Read more

"...In addition to Eleanor, there is a whole cast of quirky and realistic characters who add additional depth to an already intricate story...." Read more

"...It's relatable because the characters come across so realistic and real and their is diversity representing family life that I know and experience..." Read more

"...Even with all her flaws, misjudgments, and poor timing, Eleanor remains likeable , especially as her older and wiser perspectives emerge...." Read more

Customers find the book profound, inspiring, and interesting. They appreciate the valuable lessons embedded throughout the journey. Readers also say the book takes them on a lifelong journey from the perspective of a woman. They mention it's rich and stirs memories.

"...In sum, this was an engaging and thought-provoking book …one I will not soon forgot. I recommend to anyone who loves a good family saga...." Read more

"...and have to say that I didn’t find Count the Ways depressing, I found it inspiring ...." Read more

"...It had some poignant, universal themes of early loss , rape,divorce, spouse abuse, and life altering sudden tragedy woven with contemporary themes of..." Read more

"...It is so well woven, so deep , so real. At times it is depressing, sad, shocking. But the overall feeling for me is nostalgia...." Read more

Customers find the book hard to put down. They appreciate the strong, well-developed characters that touch their hearts. Readers also mention that the book is well-woven, deep, and real.

"...This book is about love and loss, grief, gratitude, forgiveness and resilience ...." Read more

"...It is so well woven , so deep, so real. At times it is depressing, sad, shocking. But the overall feeling for me is nostalgia...." Read more

"...love Eleanor & your heart will break for her as you are amazed at her strength + resilience . All of the characters are so interesting...." Read more

"...been a fan if Joyce Maynard’s, but this is , by far, her outstanding masterpiece !" Read more

Customers find the book beautiful, vivid, and colorful. They say it gives a beautiful clarity and perspective to women of their generation. Readers also mention the story is real and relatable to many.

"...her boxes, a charming fixer-upper house, a river, beautiful surroundings to inspire her creativity , and privacy. Love will come eventually...." Read more

"...All of her books are brilliant, but this one, for me, gave a beautiful clarity and perspective to women of my generation and I feel grateful and..." Read more

"... This book is so real and related to so many of us. I'm a fan of this author." Read more

"A truly wonderful, down to earth look at what life brings to us, and what we survive!..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the sadness of the book. Some mention it's heartbreaking and joyous, while others say it's frustratingly sad and disturbing.

"...This book is about love and loss, grief , gratitude, forgiveness and resilience...." Read more

"...the cycles of Eleanor’s and the children’s clashes and not a story that gladdens the heart ...." Read more

"...As I said, not depressing : inspiring." Read more

"...….We’ll, it’s one thing to be a huge martyr, but Eleanor was ridiculously self-pitying and wouldn’t stop going on and on about it. Enough already...." Read more

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, count the ways.

About the Book

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family --- from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives.

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted --- summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire, and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family.

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives --- through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother --- Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding on and learning to let go, COUNT THE WAYS is an achingly beautiful, poignant and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love and forgiveness.

Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard

Publication Date: July 5, 2022
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
ISBN-10: 0062398288
ISBN-13: 9780062398284

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Count the Ways: A Novel

Description.

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

About the Author

Praise for Count the Ways: A Novel

"Cut[s] across moments of national and personal upheaval to examine the complex web of family against the backdrop of history." — New York Times Book Review

“Readers will sink into Maynard’s masterful portrait of one woman’s life in this decades-spanning family saga.” — Library Journal (starred review)

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Count the Ways: A Novel (Paperback)

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Description

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives

Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

About the Author

Praise For…

"Cut[s] across moments of national and personal upheaval to examine the complex web of family against the backdrop of history." — New York Times Book Review

“Readers will sink into Maynard’s masterful portrait of one woman’s life in this decades-spanning family saga.” — Library Journal (starred review)

Fiction / Women
Fiction / Coming of Age
Fiction / Literary
Fiction / War & Military
Fiction / Sagas
Literary Collections / American
Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths
Fiction / Thrillers / Military
Fiction / Romance / Military
Fiction / Family Life
Kobo eBook (July 12th, 2021): $9.49
Hardcover (July 13th, 2021): $28.99
Paperback, Large Print (July 13th, 2021): $30.99
MP3 CD (July 13th, 2021): $39.99
Compact Disc (July 13th, 2021): $44.99

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Review of Count the Ways Book

I’ve loved Joyce Maynard’s writing since I read on Labor Day many moons ago – and I fondly remember that it was one of the first books sent to me as a book blogger. Since then, I have read many of his other books-At home in the world; which I bought in London before taking part in his memoir retreat in Guatemala under the influence; a gift from my ex-boyfriend that he bought me at a bookstore in Venice Beach on our first birthday; According to her, which I read on a long weekend in Byron Bay, and the best of us – a book that made me cry hideous, endless, endless tears when I was alone at home in my apartment in North Hollywood. I vividly remember reading and loving each of them, and so I was delighted when Joyce announced that she was working on a new book, while she was seized at her house on Atitlan Lake at the beginning of the recent time.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get an advanced copy from the US, my local Bondi bookstore ordered it for me, and while I had put together a solid list of books I wanted to go through in July; as soon as my copy arrived, all the other books were quickly moved aside to make room for Count the Ways, Joyce’s tenth book.

Book Review: Count the Ways There are few authors who understand me as much as Joyce. Usually, when I’m reading, although I love a book, I find it almost impossible to read for more than twenty minutes at a time without checking my phone (for which, God knows – it’s a habit that I’ve adopted and that I passed indescribably). And yet, when I read Count the Ways, it was hard for me to break away from it. I was torn between going through it in one session and enjoying it to make it last. In the end, I read it for four days-my to-do list was left on the track, my step count decreased; my phone ignored (thank God) when I remembered the unchanged joy of leaving the world and getting lost in the pages of a book.

I have already talked about how incomparable Joyce’s sense of decor is and how exactly I was reminded of why I love her writing. As a reader, I was transported to the farm in New Hampshire, which is the setting for much of the story and which is as much a character as the family that is there.

Count the Ways is a story of love, marriage, parenting, infidelity, art and forgiveness and an epic family saga that follows the life of Eleanor and Cam from their first meeting, through their blossoming romance, to their years of raising children and finally the passed of their relationship after a disaster that deeply shook the family.

I loved the family, rich in nuances and complexities; I loved the nostalgia that seamlessly weaved through the story, I loved the multi-layered characters and the way Joyce portrayed the Beloved Farm as a character in itself, full of chaos, laughter and joy, until the day when it was not. An ambitious, flawless story about an imperfect family and its mistakes and misdeeds; counting Manners is an impressive saga about love and loss and about the redemptive power of forgiveness. As with every one of Joyce’s books I have read, this is a story that I will put in the hands of everyone I can, and whose power and emotion I will remember for a long time to come.

Counting Ways by Joyce Maynard Summary In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard tells the story of a family from the hopeful beginnings of young marriage to parenthood, annulment and its costly consequences—to shed light on how parents’ mistakes are passed down from generation to generation in order to fester or be healed.

After falling in love in the after years of the 1970s, Eleanor and Cam pursue their dream of raising three children on a farm in New Hampshire. Their life is seemingly idyllic with summer softball games and Labor Day barbecues, days of snow and ice skating on the pond. But when a tragic accident permanently injures the youngest child in the family, Eleanor blames Cam. His inability to forgive him leads to a devastating betrayal: an affair with the family’s babysitter, which leads to the end of their marriage.

Over the following decades, the five members of this broken family—and the many others that make up their world—make surprising discoveries and decisions that sometimes bring them closer together and often tear them apart. As we follow the family from the days of illegal feticide and conscription to the beginning of the computer age, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS epidemic, the first awakening of the #MeToo era and beyond, through the change of one of the children and the decision of another to stop communicating with his mother, we experience a family forced to face the essential and painful truths of its past and find salvation in the face of an unforeseen catastrophe.

With lovable, flawed characters and a keen sense of detail, Joyce Maynard turns the territory she knows best—home, family, parenting, love and loss—into a page-turning thriller. In this painfully beautiful novel, she reminds us how great sadness and joy can coexist—and often do.

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