My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Franny’s husband, Harry, died a slow, miserable death from cancer. Then her mother, Isla, sank into the sad morass of dementia and had to be put into an assisted living center. It was not a happy task. At the same time, the lives of Franny’s twin daughters, Emma and Jani, are upset by a flurry of troubling pregnancies. Jani is expecting her third child and fears complications. Jenny, a distant acquaintance, arrives at Emma’s house and announces that she and her husband of two days need a place to stay. He splits before she knows that she is expecting. Alice, Jani’s nanny, realizes that she is pregnant and doesn’t know where the father is. While all these stressful events are unfolding, Fanny is being courted, maybe seduced is a better word, by her boss, Bryan. Emma and Jani are aghast, but none of them know that Bryan is damaged goods. Could it possibly end well?
Tamara Miller is the queen of family drama. She brilliantly draws the reader into the landscape and time period of her stories, and, of course, into the joy and heartaches of her characters’ lives—Decisions having more heartaches than joys. Ms. Miller’s prose is clean and flowing. She illustrates her scenes with slices of real-life—kids squealing around the Christmas tree, the thrill of an illicit kiss, or the terror of contemplating an illegal abortion. Decisions is the fifth volume in her Family Forever series. She says it’s the last. We can hope that’s not true.
Highly Opinionated 