Before and Again #beforeandagain #barbaradelinsky #stmartin’spress #deathofachild #grief #forgiveness #yaya_reads @absltmom

A split second can change your life. A glance away can be the moment when life does change. A heart refusing to heal can end a marriage. ….and guilt filling every portion of one’s body can make life an unending torture.

Mackenzie Cooper has lost everything, a beloved daughter, a husband she loved, a mother who blames her, and the ability to forgive herself. For a moment in time she took her eyes off the road and a horrible collision happened, one that took the life of her child and the life she had grown accustomed to. She feels she is a outcast in her community as friends disappear, her mother shuns her blaming Mackenzie not only for the death of her grandchild but also for the death of her husband. Mackenzie’s marriage falls apart to Edward as so many marriages do after the loss of a child. How can her life continue in this place where everything is a memory and all reminds her of what use to be?

Mackenzie moves away to a small town in Vermont where she buries the past and learns to move forward on her own. She acquires good friends, a job she loves, pursues her artistic passion and while not happy seems content. Then all that changes when a friend’s son does something which will probably propel Mackenzie into the world she is so afraid to find herself in once again.

This story was told with much compassion and the spirit of how we can move forward and find meaning in both the life that has been lost as well as in our own selves. It was a poignant story that showed so well what it is like to lose a child and live a life in which guilt is ever present. Ms Delinsky did a wonderful job making all of her characters so vivid and real. As Ronald Reagan said, “When a child loses his parent, they are called an orphan. When a spouse loses her or his partner, they are called a widow or widower. When parents lose their child, their isn’t a word to describe them.”

Thank you to Barbara Delinsky, St Martin’s Press, and NetGalley for making a copy of this riveting book available to me.

  I was born and raised in suburban Boston. My mother’s death, when I was eight, was the defining event of a childhood that was otherwise ordinary. I took piano lessons and flute lessons. I took ballroom dancing lessons. I went to summer camp through my fifteenth year (in Maine, which explains the setting of so many of my stories), then spent my sixteenth summer learning to type and to drive (two skills that have served me better than all of my other high school courses combined). I earned a B.A. in Psychology at Tufts University and an M.A. in Sociology at Boston College. The motivation behind the M.A. was sheer greed. My husband was just starting law school. We needed the money.

Following graduate school, I worked as a researcher with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and as a photographer and reporter for the Belmont Herald. I did the newspaper work after my first son was born. Since I was heavily into taking pictures of him, I worked for the paper to support that habit. Initially, I wrote only in a secondary capacity, to provide copy for the pictures I took. In time, I realized that I was better at writing than photography. I used both skills doing volunteer work for hospital groups, and have served on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and on the MGH’s Women’s Cancer Advisory Board.

I became an actual writer by fluke. My twins were four when, by chance, I happened on a newspaper article profiling three female writers. Intrigued, I spent three months researching, plotting, and writing my own book – and it sold.

My niche? I write about the emotional crises that we face in our lives. Readers identify with my characters. They know them. They are them. I’m an everyday woman writing about everyday people facing not-so-everyday challenges.

My novels are character-driven studies of marriage, parenthood, sibling rivalry, and friendship, and I’ve been blessed in having readers who buy them eagerly enough to put them on the major bestseller lists. One of my latest, Sweet Salt Air, came out in 2013.  Blueprints, my second novel with St. Martin’s Press, became my 22nd New York Times bestselling novel soon after its release in June 2015.  Making Up, my work in progress, will be published in 2018.