Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard was already on my TBR list, but when it was recommended as a best book of the year by my favorite blogger, Gayle Weiswasser here, I moved it to the top of the list. I have enjoyed Maynard’s books in the past (Under the Influence, After Her, and Labor Day – before I was reviewing books), so I imagined this one would also be a winner. While I liked it a lot, it wasn’t five-star for me. Close, but it was a little too depressing and a little longer than it needed to be, in my opinion. Well worth reading, but not the best of the best. Amazon: “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.”