This is the first Sue Miller book I read. I am intrigied by the idea that someone can totally lie about her past, completely change her identity, leave her first husband, marry a great guy, have three pretty good kids, almost have an affair with a murderer and get off totally scott free, with no retribution to pay. Her husband gives her a hard time for a while and even throws a tomato at her (though he misses her on purpose), but in the end he forgives her. Even her mother forgives her for leaving her first husband and disappering for 2 years. Doesn't she have any guilt or regret for all her deceit? She had hardly done one honest thing in her life. Why doesn't she have to pay a price for that? The only thing she was ever honest about is that she prefers animals to most people. She is obviously more comfortable with animals because she doesn't need to lie to them.

One thing I really did like about this book is the interview with the author and the discussion questions in the back of the book. I enjoy learning what the author had in mind when they write a book. This helped to clarify a few details for me. Otherwise, I thought the ending was just a little too neat and tidy for me. She should have to suffered a little bit more for her dishonesty.

Jo Becker has a great life: a thriving veterinary practice, three grown daughters, and a beautiful home in the Massachusetts countryside. She's happily married to Daniel, a pastor and stabilizing, if not predictable, influence on the family.

An eerie sense of premonition--a warning--summons Jo to alertness. Something in her life is about to change.

Someone from her past, a roommate in a shared communal house moves to her quiet town, stirring memories of a carefree, and yet tragic time. Suddenly Jo finds fault with her charmed life. As she is drawn closer to Eli, her fantasy life leads to irritation with her husband and daughters. The promise of excitement is in Eli and she willingly casts her valuable life aside. But reality comes crashing in when Jo learns Eli's role in the tragedy they shared.

This is a suspenseful tale: will Jo sucomb to temptation? Will she reveal what she knows about Eli?

The pace of the story is interesting--it seems to climax during a flashback. The meat of the story, the modern-day tale, is small in comparison.

This book is a tale of a woman in midlife. You hear the thoughts in her head and are amazed they are not dissimilar to your own. She has moments that freeze in time, where she recalls past events, suddenly and very vividly. Events that though are not forgotten, but have gotten rusty due to lack of use.

With this reminiscing she recalls her former self and tries to understand the people and events in her past. Some were very disturbing. Most are guilded with the innocence of youth.

The author sets the stage with the main character Jo, having an "epiphany" of sorts, a freeze frame that another turning point in her life is being reached. She builds for the reader the story of Jo's life with the day to day details. When you are reading this book, you are Jo, if only for a moment.

In this contented recently empty nest life, Jo and her husband a minister she does not share a faith with, go about their normal lives with no sense of "what's next". Only recently has the last of their 3 daughters moved out and they are reinventing their schedule and getting to know one another as a couple again.

Due to a connection provided by her daughter Sadie, Jo runs into a former friend of her counter-culture life in her early 20s. Back when they shared a communal house one of their housemates was murdered. The author builds through Jo's recollecting how she remembers that life and it's initial innocence. It also shows Jo's confused sense of self at that time.

Jo's relationship to her past is soon caught up in her association with this man. This sets up events that nearly destroy her marriage. This relationship provides her an opportunity to explore and revisit the person she once was. She examines her motivation and questions it as well. It is a very good portrait of some of the questions one asks oneselves when faced with hard issues. Most of us would like to think we know the answers. Most of us find out, we have no clue.

Without giving away the twist of the story, I have to say, the author had my heart pounding when I realized what a dialogue was unfolding into. It was masterfully handled and ironically later on was paralleled with one conversation Jo had with her mother.

This book gets into your head and you understand many of Jo's feelings observations and day to day life. You get to understand how she thinks. She is a closed person and you see this in her thoughts, which are rarely revealed to the characters around her. Her relationship to her coworkers, husband and daughters are well defined. As a mother you can see the dynamic that unfolds, when there is family competition between childen. The author handles this well.

I found this book facinating and highly recommend it.

The only critique I would make is to the author. While Jo and her husband are highly educated people, I'm not sure some of the "vocabulary" is realistic for the characters. I felt sometimes the author dipped into her own background with linguistics versus the characters. This happened only a few times, but it seemed out of character at the time.

I made myself finish this because I had bought it. I bought it because I had previously bought and enjoyed "While I was Gone" but this book just didn't gel. It could have done with a lot of editing out of excess words and adding in of character development. Neither the characters nor action ever seemed to be wholly developed. I also felt that the jumps back in forth in time and the use of the present tense were done awkwardly - they came acoss as a creative writing experiment which really didn't help the story to move.

While I have liked some of Sue Miller's books ("The Good Mother" and "Inventing the Abbotts"), this one was very unsatisfying to me (as was "While I Was Gone"). I never felt that I knew the characters and because of this, could not understand their motivation. It was as though I was viewing them through a cloudy lens...the characterizatons just never were clear.

I tried to feel sympathy or even empathy for Lottie and Cameron, but could never muster any. They just never really engaged me as a reader.

Also, parts of their history and background seemed to be missing, as if lost in all of the changes of time that Miller used.

I will try "Family Pictures" next.....hope I can get more involved.

"For Love" takes place over the course of a summer in Boston. Lottie is struggling with her second marriage and she's using the summer to figure out what she wants. She and her grown son Ryan spend the summer preparing her childhood home for sale, while her husband Jack stays home in Chicago. Meanwhile, her brother Cameron rekindles his high school romance (obsession) with Elizabeth, who has since married but has returned to her parents house down the block from Lottie, also deciding whether to leave her husband. Elizabeth, who was never nice to Lottie as a teenager, tries to befriend Lottie, putting her in the middle of a difficult relationship between her and Cameron.

Sue Miller's books tend to start the reader out in the middle of a story, and as the action progresses, we learn about the main character's past through flashbacks. She uses this technique here as well, and I think it generally works. In the first chapter, Cameron accidently runs over Elizabeth's au pair in a wild attempt to keep her from returning to her husband. That sets the stage to show us how this affects Lottie and what led to this event. Over the course of the book, we learn that Lottie met her second husband Jack while his wife was deeply ill and that their relationship is in many ways defined by the slow death of his wife. We learn that Lottie's father was arrested for embezzlement when she was a child, and she grew up with her alcoholic mother, both angry at her and guilty for being favored over Cameron. Yet Cameron has become the devoted one, looking after their mother as she deteriorates in the nursing home. We learn that Lottie takes pride in growing up without wealth, for having tacky taste, for not going the conventional route, and yet she chooses Jack, who is a doctor, with money and refined tastes. All of this (and more) figures in how Lottie eventually makes her decision and, perhaps, comes to accept herself.

This is my third book by Sue Miller, and like her others, it has interesting and complex characters and it has many insights about human behavior. But while I found Lottie's journey is interesting, this book didn't affect me as much as "While I Was Gone" or "The Good Mother." The story felt a little disjoint at times -- it seemed like if you put the story back in chronological order, there would be some important periods missing. I sometimes felt that I didn't understood Lottie's emotional development and the reasons she made the choices she did. At the end, although I expected Lottie to make the decision she did, I didn't really understand why from her point of view. Still, I liked Lottie's unconventional ways and I appreciated the emotional complexity of her character. It's not my favorite of Miller's book, but I wasn't sorry I read it.