What's Worth Keeping by a new to me author, Kaya McLaren felt deeply personal as if the author is well acquainted with the emotions if the characters. I had thought that the three main characters along with Great-Aunt Rae would take the journey together. I will admit that I was a bit disappointed to see the three of them separated early in the book. However as I read on I could see how it was necessary for each to take their own journey to arrive at the same destination. One of my favorite characters is Great-Aunt Rae. Her solid, down to earth but wise was an anchor for this family. Everyone needs someone like her in their lives.

This is a story of great loss, a fight for life, second chances and reconnection. It is sad in many parts but it is hopeful too. I will say you should have the tissues handy. The sad events, perspectives and emotions are so-so real and authentic it is impossible not to be touched by them.

An ARC of the book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley which I voluntarily chose to read and reviewed. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A story of healing Paul Bergstrom is a police officer and hasn’t been right since he helped rescue and recover those in the Oklahoma bombing. Amy is now recovering from cancer that involved several surgeries. Carly, their daughter is just scared and also mad as the type of cancer her mother had is hereditary. You find out how each is feeling as well as how they are dealing with it. Carly has been taken by her father to Great Aunt Rae’s horse ranch in the mountains. She wasn’t happy about it but with the help of T Rex, a Clydesdale horse, and Great Aunt Rae, she comes around. Amy is traveling through forests that she traveled with her father. Paul is working on a house he planned or remodeling but when the pipes burst years ago, he put it all on the back burner. Will they be able to get through all the trauma and tragedy and rejuvenate their family into a stronger unit.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and this is my honest review.

This book is heavy as the Bergstrom family are at the edge of falling apart. Amy is navigating her breast cancer diagnosis, Paul suffers trauma from the Oklahoma City bombing, and their daughter Carly feels hopeless for her future if she shares the same genetic fate as her mother. The story is told from their three alternating perspectives as they navigate a summer apart for some soul searching.

The book was kind of depressing for a while, and I couldn’t help but get frustrated with how they all pushed each other away. I haven’t shared these experiences so I can’t imagine how I’d react in the same situation, but ultimately enjoyed how the story and characters came together and grew in the end. I loved Great Aunt Rae’s character and the wisdom she brought to the family. She was the source of healing and connection among the characters, even if from a distance.

I wish there was a bit more at the end to conclude the story, or a glimpse at the family at a point in the future.

If you can handle an emotional read that reminds you of the importance of healing and forgiveness, then pick up What’s Worth Keeping when it publishes January 19.

Amy is struggling to heal herself mentally and physically after her cancer diagnosis. Carly, Amy’s daughter, is in such pain watching her mom suffer and then realizing her life might take the same path. Then there is Paul, Amy’s husband. Paul is a homicide detective and he also has PTSD. He is at a loss on what to say or do to help Amy recover.

Wow! What a fantastic, powerful novel. This is a tale not to be missed. But it may not be for everyone. If the wounds are still raw…this story is going to open them up full blast.

This is a heavy, emotional read and I loved everything about it. It is about healing and coming together when your world is falling apart. This is a book which I will think about over and over again. I never reread…but I just might have to reread this one.

Do not miss this one…add it to your list today!

I received this novel from the publisher for a honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC. It’s a book that I wasn’t sure I would finish because it was just too sad. But that said, I read it and came to like the characters who each had their own traumas to heal from. Definitely worth reading.

Amy Bergstrom is recovering physically after her cancer treatment, but the mastectomy and hysterectomy have left her emotionally scarred. Her husband Paul, an Oklahoma City police officer had been distant ever since the bombing in the federal building. In order to block out his emotions from the horrible things people do to each other, he also blocks out the good. Carly, their teenage daughter, is terrified after finding out her mother's form of cancer is genetic. If she has the same gene, what is the point of going to college or starting a relationship if she's only going to die young? The summer after Carly's graduation, they all spend time apart in ways that bring them healing and hope to come back together as a family.
This was a beautiful story of hope and healing. The author did an excellent job of describing the emotional pain of each character. Thank you to St. Martin's Press and Kaya McLaren for the opportunity to read this wonderful book.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley. The views and opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

What's Worth Keeping
Rating: 4 stars
Thank you to the publisher for the ARC given through NetGalley for review. All opinions are my own.

What's Worth Keeping is about a family that has gone through two traumatic events and how years or months later they are still learning how to adapt and return to being a "normal" family. This was such a good story and you just feel for what Paul, Amy and Carly are going through. The story is told in each of their POVs. We see how each have been dealing with these events and even though most of the book they spend it apart, you can see how they love each other, yet they struggle to understand how things can be okay again.
Paul, Amy and Carly needed time on their own to find themselves. They each need to work on rebuilding themselves and therefore rebuild the family they are meant to be.
They each go on their own path. It is until then that they realize what they want in life and for themselves.
I highly recommend this story because it was nice to see a family come together after going through so much,

Reading the first few pages of a book by a new to you author is a lot like being given a surprise: you hope you’ll like it, but you’re wary nonetheless. The first few pages of What’s Worth Keeping by Kaya McLaren were the bad kind of surprise because my opinion of the main character, Amy, who is at the heart of this novel was not complimentary. If I didn’t like the main character, how was the reading of the rest of the novel going to go?

The characters in What’s Worth Keeping are complex, layered, much like most of the people we know in our day to day lives. So, my first impression of Amy did not stick through my reading of the entire novel, but it did revisit, which is okay. We don’t like everyone all the time.

Amy survived breast cancer, but it took a lot from her and her family. As we begin the novel, changes are happening and her husband, Paul, and daughter, Carly, are trying to navigate this new terrain as well as the terrain they’ve covered in the past year since her diagnosis and subsequent treatment. For Paul, it’s tested a decision he made months prior to her diagnosis based on his own job as a homicide detective, a first responder searching through the rubble after the bombing of of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and survivor’s guilt. For Carly, a high school senior, her mother’s cancer has awakened her to an uncertain future. Whether she has the same gene as mother and grandmother that could increase her chances for cancer in the future and what does one do with that knowledge?

The descriptions throughout What’s Worth Keeping, especially of nature, are lush, making the setting very much alive for the reader. As well, the descriptions of what Amy went through are equally descriptive, coming, undoubtedly, from McLaren’s experience as a breast cancer survivor. Some are difficult to read. Equally difficult to read are the descriptions of Paul’s experience of digging through the rubble of the Murrah building for survivors, hoping to find some of his acquaintances or some of the children from the daycare in the building still alive.

While much of the narration and experiences are sad and solemn, the novel does end on a note of hope for everyone. The reason for hope is that all of the characters have finally started communicating. This was an element I picked up on right away. No one talked to each other about what was bothering them. They reacted and judged and stayed quiet and, in Amy’s case, became bitter. How much simpler all of our interactions would be if we just talked through issues, said what was on our mind, cleared the air, allowed ourselves to be vulnerable.

The other aspect of the novel I loved and deeply respected was how attune all of the characters were to nature and what it represents. All of the plants, flowers, trees, animals, all breathe air we all share. The planet is not just for humans but for all life. Knowing this, accepting this, is a method of finding and healing oneself.

Finally, for the only character I did not mention, Great Aunt Rae. What a person! My favorite character. A woman who loved deeply and lost that love, but loves her family and the world around her and has always lived her life unapologetically. If we all could be so brave to live so well.

So, despite my initial reservations, which one should not always heed when one begins a novel, I loved this book and its connection to the natural world and recognition of how we all would be much better if we communicated.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautiful emotional story about a woman who through cancer rediscover everything she loves about life, & her family. It even changes her family's perspective and beings them back together when they didn't even acknowledge that they had fallen apart. I highly recommend this book.

Amy, her husband Paul, and their daughter Carly are all struggling in the wake of her BRCA cancer diagnosis and treatment. Amy's discovery of do-it-yourself divorce papers is the catalyst for each member of the family to figure out what they want for the future. Amy takes off for a tour of national parks, dropping Carly, who has been acting out, with her Aunt Rae. Paul, a law enforcement officer who worked the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, has lingering untreated ptsd is placed on admin leave after an incident and finds himself working on the house he bought for their retirement. Carly takes to work on Rae's horse operation (I did however find it jarring every time there is reference to T-Rex's fur). The pov of each is provided in alternating third person chapters. Oddly, I found Carly most compelling, Each comes to their own place of reconciliation with themselves and each other. This is clearly a book close to McLaren's heart. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. It's a good read.

What's Worth Keeping was definitely worth reading. I do think you have to be in the right mindset when you do. It isn't an easy book. It isn't full of fluff and feel good romance. It's painful, heartfelt and real.. This book is told from three different point of views: Amy, Paul and Carly.

Amy has recently been declared "cancer free" after a hard battle that included chemo, a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy. She's a survivor but is unsure how to move forward. She's also not sure how to deal with her family. Her personal relationships are lacking and she feels disconnected. She needs to rediscover who she is.

Amy's husband, Paul is battling his own demons. As a police officer, he's seen the worst of humanity. After dealing with the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Paul because a different person. He was more withdrawn and harder to reach. The trauma that he experienced during that time changed the person he was.

Their daughter, Carly is struggling with the knowledge that her mother came so close to dying. In addition, she feels uncertain about what this means for her own mortality. As a young person on the verge of graduating high school, that's a scary place to be. Her parents are so broken themselves that they can't figure out how to help her. Hence, they enlist the help of Great Aunt Rae and her horses to save Carly. I absolutely adored Rae. She'd experienced her own personal tragedy in life and could speak to pain and hardship. She was also able to show Carly how to find the ability to move forward in life and find the beauty in things. Her character was definitely pretty special.

Overall, I have to admit there were times that reading this story was difficult for me to read. It was heartbreaking. I just wanted this family to communicate and fix their relationships. Instead, it seemed they all needed to be apart to realize how special the others were. There were some times when Amy was in the national parks that it felt as if the story moved a little slowly for me. However, it was worth pushing through for the book as a whole. I think this book can speak to anyone, whether you've been impacted by cancer or not. It speaks to those who've experienced loss of any kind and how you try to regain your sense of direction .

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. I chose to voluntarily review this book and the opinions contained within are my own.

This character-driven family story is an emotional, but quite lovely read. Told in three perspectives, wife and mother, Amy, continues to recover from breast cancer. The day after her daughter's high school graduation, she decides to leave her family to return to Washington state where her own childhood adventures took place. She's hoping that Mt. Rainier National Park - and other National Parks on the drive from Oklahoma to Washington - will help her spirit to heal along with her body. Her journey is just as much spiritual as it is physical. In the meantime, husband and father, Paul, continues to struggle with the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing fifteen years later while he continues to do his best to help as a police officer. Carly, daughter, and freshly graduated, is surprised to be abruptly dropped off at her great-aunt's horse ranch in New Mexico where her parents hope that she can lose her anger that built over the past year in dealing with her mother's illness and recovery.

As each character grows, with their own struggles, post-recovery, it doesn't sound like it would be a pageturner, but I genuinely couldn't put it down. The characters are fully formed and the beauty of so much of the natural world also really shines here. I didn't want this to end, honestly - I just wanted their stories to keep going, as I wasn't ready to say goodbye to them at all. I really loved it, and I think that this will resonate with many readers - especially those who have had their lives touched by cancer. It's a beautiful book, really, and I definitely plan on reading more from McLaren in the future. I think that this would be a good choice for book clubs and discussion groups. It's a lovely read that deals with weighty issues well. In some ways, this reminded me a bit of Jodi Picoult's early books - plus, I imagine that an audio version would be great as well!

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?

What's Worth Keeping is a profound, intimate, emotionally stirring book about survival and hope. The story is told from the points of view of three people: Amy, who has just finished treatment for breast cancer; Paul, Amy's husband, a policeman in Oklahoma City who is still haunted by the bombing, years later; their daughter Carly, who is 18 and angry and confused. At the beginning of the story, they are each in a different place, geographically and emotionally, and the book is their journey--taken alone, but with perhaps the hope of reuniting at the end. I was particularly moved by Amy's story, since I also had breast cancer. Her cancer was treated with honesty, and the author clearly understood all of the tangled feelings that Amy dealt with--that I think most cancer survivors find themselves living through. I highlighted so many passages, as there is deep wisdom in this wonderful book. It is obvious to me that the author wrote every word of this book with her heart; this story of healing is personal and poignant, and I recommend it highly

This was a different genre than I normally read, however, I really enjoyed it. It was sad and happy all at the same time. I was rooting for Paul and Amy to stay together throughout the book as they both struggled with personal demons and how to come to terms with how their life was currently going. It is a quick read and I definitely recommend it.

Heart-wrenching. What's Worth Keeping by Kaya McLaren was the story of a woman diagnosed with cancer and the toll it took not only on her but, also her family.

Most often when I read about a disease it is told from the viewpoint of one character. This book is unique in that it is told not only from Amy's point of view. We also hear about the heartbreak from her husband and her daughter.

The story hooked me from the beginning and maintained my interest right to the very last page. I had a vested interest in the family and wanted to know if they survived and thrived. They each handle things in their own way. Each scenario was different and interesting.

If you love family drama, medical stories and learning new things, I urge you to pick up a copy of this book when it comes out. There is something in this story for everyone.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for a fair and honest review. Thank you for the opportunity!

Oh, I cried probably not even 5 minutes into this. The descriptions of what was happening was so vidid, I felt like I was watching the saddest movie play out in front of me. I actually felt my heart physically hurt reading about Amy and Carly. Ugh.

To me, the scariest, yet most freeing thing, is to be alone with your own thoughts. Amy goes through this journey of healing, and while she’s on this physical and metaphorical journey, she’s alone with her thoughts. At times, I almost felt like an intruder eavesdropping and didn’t want to be rude and listen in.

There’s about 642 trigger warnings, and this is a very heavy book, so please practice self care before and after this book. I do want to point out What’s Worth Keeping does discussed topics in a different light, and I appreciated that. It was raw, it was real, and very easy to relate. From the unwillingness to look down in the shower because of the mental and physical scars of a mastectomy, to the fear of the future knowing you may be next, to the irritability that comes from the lack of sleep because you keep replaying the same tragic even over and over again, these are all raw emotions that I appreciated and made this story so much better than I could imagined.

This story of loss and growth, also rediscovery of self is one that will sit with me for a while. Thank you St. Martin’s for the gifted copy. What’s Worth Keeping is out January 19th.

This story is told in the alternating voices of Amy, her husband, and her daughter. Amy is a breast cancer survivor who, on the day she got her cancer diagnosis, found divorce papers that her husband was having drawn up. Amy's husband, Officer Paul Bergstrom, is battling PTSD because he never really dealt with and recovered from clearing bodies from the Oklahoma City Bombing. Since then, his job as a police officer frequently brings those old memories to the surface. His only coping mechanism has been to deaden his feelings, good and bad, in order to survive. Their daughter Carly has been spiraling ever since her mother got the cancer diagnosis, and now that she has just finished high school, her parents are deperate for her to get her life back on track before it is too late.
This is a very emotional read. It is very well-written. It is a very heartbreaking novel, but I felt like it almost threw in too many deep subjects. It almost overpowered the novel. ( On top of the cancer disgnosis and Paul's PTSD, Amy's father had alzheimer's). Overall, this was a good but depressing novel.

Paul, Amy, and Carly are a family. They are all feeling torn apart after Amy's cancer diagnosis.
The story follows all 3 on different paths that will eventually lead back to one another.

After finding divorce papers, Amy decides to go to visit all the National Parks on the way back to where she grew up. She finds the beauty in nature and the will to keep on living her best life.

Paul worked in the rubble to rescue people trapped after the Oklahoma City bombing. He still thinks about that day and the months following and is still haunted by it. He takes his daughter to her great-aunt's ranch in New Mexico and sets to restoring a house they had purchased 2 years before Amy's diagnosis.

Carly is mad that her father dropped her off and left her at her great aunt's house. She lives get Aunt but doesn't want to spend the summer there helping do tours. Until she sees again her favorite horse T. Rex again.

I think I looked Paul's journey the best of of the three

I requested this book on a whim and it is not necessarily my normal type of book, but it sounded good so I went with it. It was very good. I had an acquaintance who had a terminal cancer diagnosis that she overcame tell me once that she was just kind of floundering in life once she beat cancer because she had prepared to die and didn't know how to reverse that. That has stayed with me for years. This book really seemed to develop those thoughts - how do you move on from cancer?

Amy is recovering from cancer and is not sure how to restart her life so she goes on a trip through National Parks that she spent time in growing up. At the same time her newly graduated daughter is trying to deal with her mother’s cancer and the genetic implications. Finally, her husband is a cop who was in Oklahoma City during the bombing and still has trouble dealing with that. There is a lot to this book, but it is a really good quick read.

There were moments at first that felt a little like someone writing just to get their own personal thoughts out on paper not really writing a novel, however, as the story progressed I got into the story and enjoyed seeing what happened to the characters and how they all were going to move on in their life.

And, really, my favorite part of the book was Great Aunt Rae. I would wish for everyone a Great Aunt Rae who knows just when to speak and when not to. And when she did speak the wisdom that came from her was immense. Boy, that lady was amazing!

Overall, I would definitely recommend the book!