What's Worth Keeping: A Novel

I received a free electronic ARC of this novel from Netgalley, Kaya McLaren, and St. Martin's Press - Griffin. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Kaya McLaren writes a smoothly paced, compelling novel of what defines home and family. Written from the three viewpoints of wife, husband, and daughter, What's Worth Keeping covers all the bases. Husband Paul Bergstrom, a police officer who spent his third day on the Job in 1995 digging for survivors in the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building explosion. Paul has been for some time feeling ineffectual both at work and at home. He has been lost and unhappy, going so far as to obtain and fill out divorce papers. Wife Amy is exhausted, feeling pressured from all sides, and that is prior to her doctor discovering the Big C on her last physical. Carrying the same BRCA2 gene mutation that doomed her own mother to die much too young, Amy is feeling friendless and hopeless. While she is sorting through family papers in search of her health insurance details, she stumbles across those divorce papers, which are dated on the very day this fall that their daughter Carly will leave for college. Hopefully. That daughter who is not speaking to either of her parents and had basically gone off the rails at school - a former A-student, there is no certainty that she will even graduate high school this month with her class, much less get into a decent college. This novel is set in several distinctly different locales. The Bergstrom family live and work and school in Oklahoma City. After several surgeries and chemo/radiation series, Amy needs her big trees in the Cascade Mountains, places where she summered with her forest ranger family as a girl, to try to put her life back into perspective. The fixer-upper that the family plans to retire to several years down the line is located in Chama, New Mexico, around the corner from Amy's maternal Aunt Rae. Carly is, against her will, spending the next several weeks working for Aunt Rae. Dad will come and go as the job allows, working on the retirement house and keeping tabs on Carly. Aunt Rae has a farm outside of Chama, acreage that is home to several mammoth horses, and a business that functions as a sort of Dude Ranch to assorted groups for most of the year. This summer holds that defining moment this family has to survive. Will they be happier together, or split apart?