Member Reviews
This is an incredibly sad book which explores grief and the space a person leaves behind in their loved ones lives. The first time I picked it up, I found it wasn't the right time to read it - with 5 small children of my own, reading about the grief of a young girl for her mother was just too emotive. The second time I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.
Told from three points of view, we learn about Annie from her daughter, her husband and her friend. We learn about her life and what her loss means to the people closest to her. We learn about pain and love and strength. It is raw and it is deeply affecting. I loved each of the voices, I loved the writing and I loved the power of this story. It has played on my mind for weeks and I am sure it will never leave me.
If you're looking for an emotional read that eviserates you while it holds your heart in it's hands but leaves you with a hefty dose of hope and the deepest sense of love, then this is the book for you.
There are some topics so awful to contemplate that most authors wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole for fear of failure, the jagged crater of loss caused by the sudden death of a young wife and mother being one of them. Full credit, then, to Anna Quindlen for not only grasping the nettle but for doing so with a level of assurance and insight that is breathtaking in its accuracy. I know this, because After Annie is my story too.
When Annie Brown falls to the kitchen floor while making dinner for her husband and four kids, she never gets up again. An undiagnosed aneurysm has blown in her brain, and she doesn’t survive the night. It’s a horrifying scenario by any reckoning and a throat-clenching opening to this emotion-charged study on the navigation of grief.
It’s a premise that could go one of two ways: either into a mawkish tear-jerker, or into an honest but sensitive exploration of sudden loss. Quindlen chooses the latter.
The aftermath of Annie’s death plays out through three sonorant voices: that of husband Bill, widowed before the age of 40 and left to raise four young children alone; that of 13-year-old Ali, who as eldest sibling is thrust into the role of surrogate mother; and that of best friend and drug addict Annemarie.
With a sure but delicate touch, Quindlen picks at the minutiae of daily life that are forever changed: the unrumpled side of the marital bed, the vacant chair at the table, the yawning hole in family life. And in the midst of it all, a man untethered and with no compass to find his way home. A man exactly like my father 50 years ago.
But it was Ali for whom my heart ached most of all, as she stepped into the shoes of both parents, valiantly trying to maintain some semblance of normality, to do things the way mom would have done them. Now, while this may sound far fetched, believe me when I say that Quindlen’s depiction of Ali is spot on. I know, for I was once that 13-year-old girl.
As tragic as this story is, it is right that Quindlen ends it on a note of hope, for such is the reality of grief, or at least my own experience of it. It hurts like hell, but at the end of the day we get through it, quite simply because we have to.
After Annie
By Anna Quindlen
My first Anna Quindlen book. Well I just love this but it was a very tough story for me personally.
It's no spoiler to say that Annie has died. It's in the first sentence. Her family is about to sit down to dinner when she collapses on the floor, is taken by ambulance to hospital, and never regains consciousness. A brain aneurysm. Leaving four young children and a traditional breadwinner, home illiterate husband to figure out how to get through the processes and operations of keeping the show on the road.
I went blindly into this book, not a notion of what to expect, and considering this is exactly what happened to my family, it was like being electrocuted and drowned at the same time. As quietly as the story is being told, every exact detail is so correct, so relatable, I was transported 40 years back in time.
To anyone who never had to experience the loss of a young mother (sorry Ali, the death), this story might feel like a wishy washy, plotless slice-of-life tale which drifts from hiccup to hiccup, but what defines the first year after, is the getting to grips with the logistics of running a family, working out how to keep the fridge stocked with actual food, mealtimes, school runs, doctor and dentist appointments, keeping everyone's feet in shoes and everyone's bedsheets acceptable. What a luxury grief would be.
Quindlen writes each perspective, Ali, Annemarie and Bill so differently, each naturally informed by their personal relationship with Annie. Having being both an Ali, the oldest girl who is catapulted unceremoniously into premature adulthood, and the best friend, who's loss is regularly downgraded to "not family", I applaud the shorthand used to indicate the ways that grief destroys. And yet I can smile at the memories the story provokes, because that's what we did at the time, we laughed through the blunders and the messed up logistics.
Although the title of this book is "After Annie", it is also the story of Annie, from the first day herself and Annemarie click at school, their lifelong friendship, her marriage to Bill, her devotion to the residents at her care home, her abounding love for her children, her no nonsense approach to life, always laughing, always caring.
A book that makes me feel so seen, that brings so many raw memories, makes me smile and cry (sometimes at the same time) and deserves the biggest book-hug.
Publication date: 17th July 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #simonschusteruk for the eGalley
After Annie by Anna Quindlen is about how different members of a family deal with a bereavement as they try to move forwards with their lives.
Another beautifully written novel about ordinary people living ordinary lives from the underrated Anna Quindlen. Anyone who enjoys Anne Tyler’s or Carol Shields’ novels is very likely to appreciate Quindlen’s gift of focusing on the everyday whilst saying plenty about universal human experiences.
In ‘After Annie’ the Brown family comprising husband Bill and his four children, are mourning the death of their wife and mother. Not yet forty, her death is entirely unexpected and, of course, a tremendous shock. Husband Bill is completely overwhelmed and soon realises that the ‘sharing’ parental role that he thought he had was more of an 80-20 split. Eldest child, Ali, barely in her teens, feels obliged to take over many of the maternal roles: she washes, she cook, she tidies and, most of all, she misses her mother. Not until she begins seeing the school counsellor does she feel able to talk about Annie with anyone.
Annemarie is Annie’s lifelong friend and she is floundering too. Unable to cope with her grief, she does exactly what Annie has forbidden her ever to do again.
‘After Annie’ is certainly a very moving read. This is an astutely told story which tells us much about how people live with loss and learn from their grief.
My thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.
I love how Anna Quindlen writes, her words pull me in. I’ve read lots of her books and they never disappoint me. The beginning of After Annie broke my heart. Though this book is about grief, it is about more than the sadness. It really made me think about the people I’ve lost and all the emotions I went through and still do.
Thank you to Netgalley and Anna Quindlen for the opportunity to read and review this book.
Oh my, this book, beautiful and brutal, it really took me by surprise. Loss, love, grief, family, friends, friends that are family, addiction, coming of age and having to grow up far too soon. The prose reminded me of Elizabeth Strout. And I can’t pay a higher compliment. Before this, I’ve never read anything by Anna Quindlen. Now I want to read everything.
This is a quietly amazing and satisfying book to read, just a simple story about a young woman, mother of four children who dies suddenly one day of natural causes. The story is about her life and the aftermath of her death and the effect of grief on her children, her husband Bill and her best friend Annemarie. The story rattles along in an easy to read simple and almost meandering way, then suddenly stops you in your tracks a few times with sentences that are so right and say something so well. There's a story about how Bill as a child never went anywhere overnight and felt sick the first time he did, unable to sleep and literally quite unwell beign away from home. The loss of Annie is 'a new version of homesick' for him now. Another part tells of how Bill's laptop had been playing up and the technician he had help him said he had a lot of things on there, running in thr background that Bill was totally unaware of. Now 'he knew Annie had been running in the background' keeping their lives going and he hadn't noticed.
I liked the ordinariness of the lives depicted very much. Annie hadn't qualified as anything, got pregnant early on and got married young. She and Bill are ordinary but the story is dramatic as any - love and death, tragedy and comedy. There are no heroes or villains (apart from one very peripheral figure) but normal people living their lives in a small town and it carries you along very well.
Anna Quindlen's books are always fabulous but far too infrequent these days. I fell on this one when I saw it and I wasn't disappointed. Annie is a perfectly ordinary young mum. 37 years old when she dies unexpectedly in front of her family of an aneurysm. The book details the effects her death has not just on her husband and chidren but on her (and their) wider community over the next 12 months. It is very nicely and sensitivity done but doesn't pull any punches. After floundering initially, the children work through their issues, all of which are very pertinent in today's society, with the help of a school counsellor. Whilst working through the immediate family issues Quindlen also manages to comment on much larger side issues such as addiction and incest. A very relevant and useful book that pulls on the heartstrings. Recommended.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.
I got something in my eye a few times during this book - the raw grief of Annie’s family is palpable and affecting. I have read a number of Anna Quindlen’s books and they have always been good - I don’t know why she has not gained a wider recognition in the UK as I would thoroughly recommend her, she is similar to Ann Patchett.
A sad, but ultimately life affirming read.
When young mum Annie Brown dies of an aneurysm on her kitchen floor, she leaves behind her shocked and devastated family in turmoil. Her bewildered husband, Bill, throws himself into work but feels bewildered and unsure how to cope. Their teenage daughter, Ali, feels obliged to take on responsibility for the house and for her three younger brothers while trying to find a way through her own grief, her prepubescent brother Ant retreats into silence and withdrawal, and the two little ones just really miss their mother. Annie’s best friend, Annemarie, tries to help but her pain and loss threaten to trigger her addiction to narcotics which Annie had helped her beat some years before. Slowly they begin to find a way to carry on living without the woman at the centre of their world. This is a beautiful and poignant book which really rings true. Quindlen handles a difficult topic with sensitivity but manages to avoid undue sentimentality in this portrait of a family whose heart has been ripped out, yet who have to continue to function in a life that has changed dramatically. She is very skilled at showing the awkwardness of death and how people deal with it, from the well-meaning neighbours to the rather predatory single women of the area who quickly zone in on Bill. Although she dies at the beginning of the story, Annie is very much a presence, someone who had the life she had always wanted and was content in a way few are. Her kind and thoughtful treatment of the elderly patients in the care home she works at, her support for Annemarie even when her addiction led her to constantly let her friend down and the way she is described as really seeing both Bill and Annemarie in a way that nobody else does explains why she was so loved and is now so missed, but this is also why her spirit lives on. The writing is spot on- Bill feels that Annie was like the hub of a wheel, and without her the family are a group of spokes, going nowhere, while the old flame he begins seeing is very forebearing but expresses her occasional displeasure by blowing through her nostrils. Sad but also life-affirming, this is a wonderful read that will stay with me for a long time.
This is a vivid book. That made me feel all the things. I read it in one sitting and couldn’t put it down. I cannot wait for the writers next book.
Annie is 39, with 4 young children and married to Bill, a "good guy" plumber. Annie is in the kitchen cooking supper and needs an Advil for her banging headache when she collapses and dies. The novel follows how the death affects her family and friends. The oldest girl, Ali has to step up and take too much on her young shoulders when her father is a wreck. Annie's best friend, recovering painkiller addict, Anne Marie struggles with sobriety, Bill seeks solace in drink and then with an ex flame and can't focus on his children. The eldest son is also spiralling and Ali's best friend who begs her not to talk to the school counsellor is guarding a disturbing secret. Quindlen, is a master storyteller who draws you into the world of the family and you start to become engrossed in their trajectories and hoping they can find hopeful futures.
Annie and Bill were an ordinary couple leading busy lives: four children, a plumbing business and working in a care home put paid to much in the way of leisure. When Annie collapses after calling out for some Advil while their children sit down to supper, Bill is poleaxed. Thirteen-year-old Ali quietly steps in, doing her best to fill the chasm left by her mother while Annie’s best friend, Annemarie, tries hard to keep a grip on her sobriety.
Anna Quindlen shifts perspectives between Ali, Bill and Annmarie, their thoughts flooded with memories of the strong, capable, warm and loving Annie, far from saintly but popular and loved by almost all who knew her, as they find their way through the first stages of a seemingly unbearable grief. Her characters are perceptively portrayed: Ali, the eldest, takes on far too much of her mother’s role, Bill too lost in grief and unable to express it to see what’s going on, while Annmarie loses her way. With Quindlen’s characteristic empathy, this understated, compassionate novel explores the everyday occurrence of death and grief, offering the hope of healing. I’ve been reading Quindlen’s novels for years. They never quite seem to get the attention they deserve. Perhaps After Annie will change that.