FINDING GRACE

Cooper’s novel tells the story of the struggles of Midwestern family.

Charlie Booker grows up in a series of foster homes after his mother leaves him at a fire station as an infant. At Harvard University, he meets Caroline Tate during a biology lab and marvels at her free spirit and passion for science. Their relationship progresses quickly, and they marry and move to Two Harbors, Minnesota. It turns out that he wants kids and she doesn’t, but Charlie merely sees this as a challenge: “He remembered the long road he traveled before he dared to propose and wasn’t ready to surrender on the baby question quite yet.” When she doesn’t change her mind, though, he secretly replaces her birth control pills with aspirin without her knowledge, and she becomes pregnant. The devoutly religious Caroline won’t consider an abortion, and Charlie won’t consider adoption. Instead, Charlie promises to take sole responsibility for raising their daughter, Grace. Later, Caroline accepts a position as a professor in Portugal and leaves the family, and Grace struggles with feelings of abandonment, resentment, and depression. Eventually, a letter from Caroline results in Grace’s staging her own disappearance. Over the course of this often heartbreaking novel, Cooper delves into a number of disturbing themes, such as mental illness, guilt, and personal ambition. Her characterizations of the three major characters are raw and realistic, and her story ably navigates the complexities of a dysfunctional family. The prose often has an engaging flow and has some surprising moments, although there are occasional distracting punctuation errors that might have been caught with a stronger edit. Still, the author offers plenty of well-chosen details throughout the book as she sets her scenes.

An effective exploration of one family’s complicated troubles.