Erin Zak

Hollywood actress Gwendolyn Carter is about to discover that losing someone you love sometimes means gaining someone to fall for.

The Road Home

Jude Silberfeld

Gwendolyn Carter has spent the last seventeen years hating her mother for all the ways she’s put her down as she was growing up and, most of all, for her terrible response when she discovered her only daughter was a lesbian. Summoned home for her dad’s birthday, Gwendolyn is faced with multiple challenges. Not only is her mother sick and probably dying, Gwendolyn has to get along with the woman who, to all intents and purposes, took her place in the household, becoming Carol’s new daughter, her best friend and her colleague. To top it all, David, Gwendolyn’s father, her hero, turns out to not be such a great guy after all.

I have so many feelings about this book, I’m not sure where to start. Maybe with acknowledging how brave it is of Erin Zak to have written this book. This isn’t simply a work of imagination. It’s wonderfully written but what makes it so moving is how raw it feels, how real. I don’t know if I would be able to revisit such a heart-wrenching experience as losing a parent and come out with something so beautiful.

In addition to the grief the characters start preparing themselves to, and already face as soon as they learn Carol’s cancer is back, Erin Zak describes with delicate brush strokes all that’s complex in mother/daughter relationships, the resentment, the love, the admiration, the need for validation. As Gwendolyn re-evaluates her own behaviour and her reactions to her mother’s behaviour, she opens herself to something new and magnificent, as she allows herself to see Lila, her mother’s surrogate daughter, for who she is and not the person Gwendolyn has refused to even imagine liking. The attraction is undeniable, inconvenient and breathtaking. The chemistry between the two women is tremendous, and I love how they deal with the notion that they’re both Carol’s daughters, yet not, and the potential creepiness. I love that they have such a hard time resisting and I love the moment they decide to give in. And while the romance arc is awesome, each and every relationship of the story is complex and layered, whether it’s Gwendolyn’s relationship to her parents, to her best friend, to volleyball, to her career as an actress in Hollywood, or Carol and David’s marriage, Lila’s relationship with both Carol and David, with the volleyball players she coaches. Every one of them is full of little things that make them genuine and plausible.

Erin Zak is one of those authors I kinda missed, for some reason. The first of her books I read was Beautiful Accidents last year, and, for me, it was 5* all the way. I think I loved this one even more…

I received a copy from the publisher and I am voluntarily leaving a review.

Megan Cooper

4.5 Stars
Wow - really enjoyed this book. There was so much going on on the interpersonal levels between not only the leads but with the secondary characters - it gave the story a phenomenal amount of depth and pathos. Zak likes her angst - and there's lots of angst triggers in this novel: estranged mother/daughter, rivalry for mother's affection, terminal illness, distant father, hate to love relationship, career doubt and a volleyball championship. Sounds jam-packed and all over the place but Zak weaves them all together to make a particularly poignant and satisfying story. 

Returning home for the first time in years, Gwendolyn is dealing with a Hollywood career that is stalled and having to face her estranged mother and the woman who seems to have replaced Gwendolyn as a surrogate daughter. There's a brittle and icy edge to their first scenes - and Gwendolyn is no saint. I think that is what I liked best about this book - there was no black or white, right or wrong - the characters were nuanced and flawed but still willing to change and accept. The enemy to lover storyline between Gwendolyn and Lara works particularly well - especially as they are drawn closer together as Gwendolyn's mother illness progresses. Unlike a lot of lesfic novels, this unravels over a months long period of time, giving all the characters a chance to shift and grow.

I won't lie - this one got me tearing up but it didn't feel like it was exploitative, the characters and the situations just resonated. There's a raw honesty and emotion in the characters and their evolving relationships that, as hard as they sometimes might be to read, also provide a wonderful sense of hope and resolution. 

Although it sounds like a dreary and depressing novel, The Road Home is a riveting family drama that has it high points and humour as well. I think, out of the books I've read this year, this is the best drama I've read and Ms Zak has a masterful ability to pull the best out of angsty tropes and make them real and relatable with characters that could very well be someone in your own life.

Strongly recommended.

The Road Home

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