And unfortunately, with everything going on in our current world, this story just really brought us down. It became a novel about what happens when the one person who matters to you—the person who holds a whole family together—is lost. Finally, it’s clear that after having Tully she suffered from postpartum depression, but again, it was not identified nor treated. The first quarter of the book describes and stretches every agonizing detail the moments after Kate's death. It makes me want to know if there will be another book, because now I want more details about these things and how everyone heals from this point.

We have addiction, cutting, family estrangement, rape, institutionalization and forced electroshock therapy, and I could keep going. Her new novel, The Women, about a young woman coming of age during the turbulent 1960's in America, who joins the Army Nurse Corps and serves in Vietnam will be published February 6th, 2024. And so everybody comes together around Tully’s hospital bed, and we go back and relive the events of Firefly Lane and then the last four years from Johnny’s point of view, Mara’s point of view, and Tully’s point of view. Using this technique can be helpful, but in Fly Away it got old because it felt repetitive at times. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative.

This book does show each of the characters that we may have loved from the first book in a very negative light. Marah Ryan is a grief stricken, guilt stricken and a very angry teenager, she believes that her mum hated her and feels so guilty that she never apologised or spoke to her mum about the troubles she gave her. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Johnny was hard to watch, especially at the beginning – he was hurting, and losing a spouse is hard for others to understand, but it was really tough to see how he wasn’t there for his kids. She got slowly to her feet and left the bathroom, pushing her way through the theater’s crowded lobby, ignoring the judgmental looks cast her way by the beautiful people drinking champagne beneath a glittering nineteenth century chandelier.

Hannah said: “Writing a “sequel” was the hardest thing I’ve done, and I do not relish the idea of trying it again. It wasn’t my favorite book in the world, but I was invested enough that I got the sequel, Fly Away, out of the library and read it in May.She wanted to forget everything that had gone wrong with her life, and how it was that she’d ended up in a place like this, alone in a sea of strangers. Slight accents are used for some of the characters, including the doctor who treats Tully in the hospital and Tully’s father. Human relationships, family and loss are all covered, with the deep connection these two women being of course the main thread that keeps the story held tightly together – and the characters of course. This one is more about Marah and Tully and we get to learn all about Tully's mom Cloud, now going by Dorothy again.

There is very minimal, if any, joy in this one, so you may have to be in the right mindset to read it.Kate’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Marah Ryan, is as lost in her grief as Tully is…until she falls in love with a young man who makes her smile again and leads her into his dangerous, shadowy world.

It’s also possible that a lot of the beginning felt repetitive because Kristin Hannah was trying to remind readers of what happened in the last book. I knew I didn't really want to watch it unfold and that I should avert my gaze, but I just couldn't do it. In Firefly Lane, we saw her meteoric rise to fame as a reporter, and in Fly Away we see her undoing. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train.Tully tries to fulfill her deathbed promise to Kate--to be there for Kate's children--but Tully knows nothing about family or motherhood or taking care of people. Told primarily from Tully's POV, we learn that in the years following her best friend's death, Tully has been in a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol. Kristin Hannah is the New York Times bestselling author of novels including Firefly Lane, True Colors and Winter Garden.