Blessings

To be honest, I don't know how much I was expecting from Anna Quindlen's Blessings. It wasn't that I thought it was going to be bad, but that it isn't the normal fare for me. I was looking for a book by an author whose last name began with 'Q,' for the A-Z challenge and I thought it would be something that I could get through, but I wasn't expecting much more. Happily, I was fairly wrong and found this book to be rather good.

Blessings is the story of Skip Cuddy, a man recently released from prison after serving her sentence for a robbery charge, and Lydia Blessings, the 80-year old woman who employs Skip as her grounds caretaker. One day, a teenage couple leave a box on the steps leading up to the apartment above the garage, where Skip lives, and inside the box, is a newborn little girl. Quindlen uses a varying third-person point of view so that we come to know Skip and Mrs. Blessings very well and come to love them as the house and the lives of both are changed by this little girl.

I enjoyed the book for the most part, alone with the process of learning the history of Quindlen's characters. Especially in the case of Mrs. Blessings, flashbacks are used to show us the paths taken to get to this point. Mostly I enjoyed this book, but is it okay if ending made me like it a little less? Is the authors choice of plot direction reason enough for my opinion to markedly drop? I saw part of it coming but part of it left me rather unhappy about how Quindlen chose to end her story, and I can't help but feel that things would have been much better if little things had changed. (I would go into more specifics if I could, but I figure ruining a story is tantamount to some sort of grave readers' sin.)

I am not sad that I picked this book from the shelves of the library and I enjoyed it more that I expected to but I was left wanting a bit more in the plot. I expect that most people would enjoy the book, ending and all, but I don't know if I will reread it any time soon.

Rating: 4.0