Really enjoyed this book by Fran Littlewood. Who hasn't wanted to just turn their car off in a traffic jam and walk away. The multiple timelines flushed out the backstory of her relationships and how they came to be in the state they were in. Being a mid-40s woman, I also "appreciated" her characterization and description of middle age woes. Will recommend to my friends for a good summer read.

I was not prepared for the emotional journey I went on while reading this book.
Author Fran Littlewood gives care in delicately constructing the character of Grace Adams.
She takes her time in allowing the reader to see all of the layers that Grace has, piecing her story together through an interesting combination of three separate timelines, one of which provides us with the rich history of Grace and her most important relationships: Her child and her husband.
Reading about Grace will allow you to laugh with her, cringe with her, yell for her, worry about her, crying with her, and hopefully come through her story a changed reader because of her.
If you're in the mental headspace to allow for a touching, moving, and emotional story, I highly recommend Amazing Grace Adams.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

I don’t understand the hype with this book. I found the story to be hard to follow at times when mid chapter grace would have flashback memories. Totally unlikely chain of events. The ending did make it all come together but not sure the journey was worth it for me.

First, I want to thank NetGalley for the advanced copy of Amazing Grace Adams. I read this book quickly because I wanted to finish it - I wanted this book to be over. That is not a good thing....

I found the multiple time lines VERY confusing. While Grace, the main character, was suffering from a mental breakdown I still found her very unsympathetic.

I would have given this 2 stars but in the last quadrant of the book the reader learns about something from Grace's past that is detrimental to her mental health. The book took on more life after that.

I actually won this ARC in a raffle and I thought it was very good. I thought the main character was very relatable. How often do we wish that we could just drive away from our life? Maybe start over somewhere else, or just needing a few days to ourselves. I enjoyed this one!

I did not finish this book. I was hoping it would take a turn for the better, but got 40% through and decided that I didn't like the woman being treated like she was useless to everybody just because she had the audacity to be over 40. The year's kept switching around, and the chapters were titled, but it was still hard to track what was going on when. I think maybe I have read too many "Teenage girls are horrible" books. Since this was written by a woman, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but, man she sure made it seem like women are just terrible and unreasonable at all ages.

This book reminded me a lot of Eleanor Oliphant. I liked this book but I felt like it was a little scattered and jumped around a lot, which made it hard for me to keep interest.

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC!

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

REVIEW TO FOLLOW.

Thank you Henry Holt and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Amazing Grace Adams.
For me, as an author, I loved how much I related to Grace, and how the first pages truly drew me in.
The characters were well-developed and it was an entertaining read. The tough part for me was the shifting timelines. I had trouble keeping up. Still, a good read, a book to take to the beach.

I would like to thank Henry Holt and Company as well as Net Galley for the opportunity to read this book as an ARC. I really wanted to like this book. Various reviews compared ti to Eleanor Olyphant and
Where'd you go Bernadette. I loved both of those books. I did not love , nor even like this book. It had several timelines, which is not usually a problem for me. However, the story line was jumpy and scatter shot. It started out with 3 main timelines, then added more as the book went on. It is the story of Grace Adams, a 45 year old woman. Whe she was younger, she won a contest for polygot of the year. She was special, loved, amazing. Now her daughter is turning 16 and wants nothing to do with her. Her husband has moved out and she has lost her job. She decides to buy her daughter a cake for her birthday, and is sure that this cake will make everything right. Grace is sitting in traffic when she decides to abandon her car, and walk to the bakery and then to her daughter. The book becomes almost silly in the encounters that Grace has in this quest. As Grace makes her way to her daughter, we have many flashbacks that detail how Grace got to this spot. After a while I wanted Grace to just throw the cake out. The other problem I had was that none of the characters were likeable. Grace is crazy, her daughter a spoiled brat and her estranged husband a lifeless cipher. I need to have someone to root for in a book, and I did not find it here. By the time it got around to detailing a wrenching family situation, I was drained and beyond caring. I realize that I am in the minority here,but this is just how I feel.

<i>’How I raged, and woke to hear the rain.’</i> - Virginia Woolf

This is a story that goes back and forth through time, but as it begins, Grace is in her car with nothing in front of her except cars. Cars sitting in every lane, waiting, the air occasionally filled with the noise of car horns blaring around her, which does nothing except adding more aggravation.

This day is important to Grace, it is her daughter’s sixteenth birthday. Sweet sixteen and, well, her Lotte is a bit of a wild child, and has a significant following on Instagram, which worries Grace.

Traffic still isn’t moving, and she has a cake that she absolutely needs to pick up, so Grace does something pretty amazing, if not necessarily a great idea, overall. Their relationship has been very strained and she really needs this gesture to show Lotte how much she loves her, and the cake is the cornerstone of that gesture. The cake is what will rescue their crumbling relationship, it has to, everything in her feels this to her very core. Traffic be damned. She gets out of her car, leaving it to walk to pick up this very important, £200 cake.

As Grace makes her way to the bakery, she is sweating profusely, whether due to the heat or perimenopause that she really hasn’t the time to acknowledge or come to terms with - she is more focused on showing Lotte how much she loves her. She may not be the perfect mother, but her love is fierce, and she needs to prove that - not just to her daughter, but to herself.

Once upon a time, life was easier, not quite as messy as it is these days for them. Once upon a time Grace was amazing, and so was her life. As a polyglot, doors were opened for her, and then her life changed. Hearts were broken. Mistakes have been made by all. Time has passed and Grace has regrets, but is desperate to prove to her daughter that she loves her. That she is not her enemy. That they are still a family.


Pub Date: 05 Sept 2023

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Henry Holt & Company / Henry Holt and Co.

With the 4th chapter in a 4th time period, I closed the book. Absolutely too much hip hopping around. Grace is a Modern Ms. who is totally self centered and is devoted to making herself “amazing” in her own eyes – screw everybody else! Definitely not the kind of person (certainly not the kind of mother) I want to read about.

This will probably appeal to those modern women, like Grace, but not to us older folks who have actually lived life (even menopause) one day at a time, conquering our obstacles with grace and decorum.

I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I quit at 11% so I will not be assigning stars. Whoops. I see I have to assign stars. Two is the best I can do.

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC. Amazing Grace Adams definitely has notes of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. This story follows Grace Adams as she navigates this stage of her life. I hate to categorize books as being about menopausal or perimenopausal women, for some reason it feels like a slight or an excuse. Anyway, Grace walks away from her life and ends finding out something very important things about herself. I did like this book, but I feel more could have been done with the character development.

I absolutely loved this book... very real and relatable! How us mothers are so hard on ourselves when it comes to parenting... but there is no handbook on mothering! I felt myself connect immediately with Grace! Very heartfelt story that pulled at my heart strings!

Thank you to the author Fran Littlewood, publishers Henry Holt and Macmillan Publishing, and as always NetGalley, for an advance digital copy of AMAZING GRACE ADAMS.

Grace has problems. Lots of them. Her marriage is not what she thought it was. Her daughter, Lotte, is tall and beautiful and not quite 16 years old, and is not at all who Grace thought she was. She keeps remembering the people her loved ones used to be-- her supportive husband, the eight year old Lotte whose mom was her hero, these people before they all started stepping around the same secrets. She trusts memories; it's the present she can't figure and she responds more and more erratically to a life that no longer makes sense to her. For she would do anything for her family, including bend over entirely backward. However that comes to look.

AMAZING GRACE ADAMS is a book unlike anything I've read before. I wasn't truly hooked on this one until the second half, and then I just couldn't walk away. To be honest, I didn't like Grace much in the first half. But I think that was kind of the point. She's an unlikely character, an unlikely person, with a certain set of traits that make her difficult to deal with, both as a partner and as a parent. In dealing with the massive problems she experiences with her family in the course of this book, Grace experiences a great deal of growth. And so do we, as audience members, in being granted the opportunity to be this close to someone who is so fraught with emotion and yet unable to manage or express it. This can be an uncomfortable read, but it is well done.

I'm not always a fan of the stylistic choice to use multiple timelines, but I think it works here because of how much the main characters experience traumatic recall in the course of the story. It honestly makes the pace a bit hectic, but that might have been intentional. Overall, I enjoyed the writing and style. Good mental health rep in here too.

Rating: 🎂🎂🎂🎂 / 5 birthday cakes
Recommend? Yes!
Finished: March 7 2023
Read this if you like:
👥️ Mental health rep
👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Stories about families
👩‍🦰 Stories about moms
👫 Coming of age
❤️‍🩹 Grief and healing

Grace is having a midlife crisis. She's mid 40s, perimenopausal, invisible to her teenage daughter, and about to be divorced.
This is the story of one day in Grace's life as she races across town to make it in time to her daughters' 16th birthday party. It's a sweltering day and she's had enough. She abandons her car in traffic and decides to walk to her husband's' house, stopping at the bakery on the way. Consumed with rage at herself and her life, she lets nothing stand in her way, determined to fix what is broken.

For this is also the story of a broken family.

As she starts her journey, she takes you back to 2 other points in time-2002 (when she first meets Ben, her husband at a linguist conference) and 4 months earlier, when her daughter Lotte is having problems in school.

For a debut novel this is an amazing feat. Contrary to other reviewers, I liked the time changes as it gave us a chance to understand Grace and Ben, their relationship, and the tragedy that strikes them. Grace buries this tragedy deep within her until it overflows into rage and despair and she's forced to confront her daughter with her misgivings. I do think Grace was too hard on herself, and the teenage daughter was just horrible. Once you realize the extent of her behavior and acting out it's just sad that she didn't feel she could just talk to her mother instead, but the teenage angst felt very real. The description of the tragedy and hearing Lotte's feelings about it gave me a lump in my throat.
The grand confrontation with Ben and Lotte was amazing and it was playing out in my head as a great movie score, handcuffs and all. I'm rooting for Ben and Grace in the next chapter of their lives and hope we see them again soon!

I finished Amazing Grace Adams over one weekend, but its fierce title character and gut-wrenching plot will be with me for a very, very long time. A deceptively simple framing structure of a woman's journey across town incorporates memories from two other defining periods of Grace's life, gradually revealing the devastation of one family and its individual members. Told in visceral, unyielding language, the narration allows us to tap into Grace's rage, love, guilt, triumph, and sorrow first hand, through both her memories and her physical exhaustion and pain. The use of rare and untranslatable words from other languages is a unique and lovely tool of expression in the narrative. Part love story, part women's fiction, this is, more than anything else, the story of a mother's love and the lengths she will go to to make sure her child knows the depth of that love. I can't recommend this debut highly enough; given the impact of this novel on my own personal psyche, I look forward to a long writing career by Fran Littlewood.

A debut novel by Littlewood which depicts a middle-aged women's reflections on her unraveling life as she tries to get to her estranged daughter's 16th birthday party. Middle aged women will be able to relate to the loss of careers, hopes, dreams, and often, so much more that is selflessly sacrificed for their children and families, and society in general, that they often begin to reflect upon in middle age as their children approach teenage years.

Littlewood nails this too often taboo topic, while dealing with other modern family hot topics involving raising teenagers in our current technology age, relationships, and divorce, with humor, charm, and emotions in this cleverly written novel.

At times the book seemed to drag on with a bit too many unrealistic escapades from Grace's task of getting her daughter's birthday cake delivered. Otherwise, overall, was a really enjoyable book and highly recommend.

I thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for my ARC of this book.

I absolutely adored Grace Adams (even in moments when she may have seemed less than lovable)! Moving throughout time (now, 2-4 months in the past, and 5-10 years in the past) we begin to get a picture of what led Grace Adams to this day. This day where she is so intent to get to her daughter's birthday party that she abandons her car in traffic and sets off on foot. Which certainly isn't the only out of the ordinary thing she'll do on her quest.

What unravels throughout the course is an exploration of why it was that Grace and her daughter weren't speaking, why her marriage dissolved, why life seems to be falling apart at the seams. Yet rather than a tragedy there is humor to be found in the experiences Grace has. You can't help but sympathize with her. And the plot is made all the better by Fran Littlewood's exquisite writing and phrasing!

Are there moments where things perhaps seem a bit unbelievable? Sure. But doesn't fiction allow us the opportunity to escape for a bit, bending the rules of what's feasible and what is not? I certainly think so.

This is a lovely debut and one that makes me quite curious to see what Fran writes in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Co. for the opportunity to read and review prior to its US publication on September 5, 2023.

Amazing Grace Adams is a beautifully written book about grief and personal accountability. The author notes that it's based on the 1993 film Falling Down with Michael Douglas, and certainly I recognized that straight away as the book started. But this is about the pressures on perimenopausal women, and mothers, and being a woman today - and our complicated feelings about marriage and motherhood. I thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of those themes and Littlewood does a great job of leading us through.

If I have a criticism as a reader -- and this is not a criticism of the writing or the book itself -- it's that I wish some of the issues weren't as concrete in this book. What I mean is that some things that were happening, such as the teenage daughter Lotte's snottiness and coldness to her mother, had an actual reason behind it. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes life is really hard with teenagers. And that's here, but there were explanations for it. Still, what Littlewood has done is make us think about whether that kind of attitude deserves a reason, or is a result of parenting, or something else. And that's a great thing to do - make the reader think.