Name: The Breakdown Lane
ISBN: 9780060587253

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Doling out advice in a Wisconsin newspaper column, Julianne Ambrose Gillis struggles with the challenges of her husband's inexplicable abandonment and her subsequent diagnosis with a serious illness, a situation for which her children undertake a dangerous journey to find their father. By the author of Christmas, Present. Reprint.

The Breakdown Lane

Peggy Walker

I haven't read any Jacquelyn Mitchard books for quite a while, and now I'm not sure why. 

I don't like to do blow by blow reviews, but I enjoyed this book a lot. 

It basically involves a woman who writes an advice column part time. Her husband goes through a midlife crisis in which he decides he wants to get back to nature and live a communal life...a far cry from his life as a University lawyer. He eventually quits his job and takes a "sabbatical" from his family, which includes 2 teenagers and a 2 year old. He does this even though his wife obviously has a sporadic mysterious illness...which is finally diagnosed as multiple sclerosis after he leaves. He becomes completely incommunicado, but is eventally tracked down at a commune in NY State where he is living under another name with a young woman and their young child with another one on the way.

The thing I like best about Mitchard is the way she writes character. She writes as two different characters in this book...of different generations, and pulls both of them off really well. I can see, hear and feel her characters, and they seem very "real" to me. I enjoy the way she writes about relationships as well, between family and between friends.

She wraps things up in an almost fairy-tale way that was a bit of a stretch for me, but I still really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to friends. I have another of her books already downloaded to my eReader, and can't wait to read that one.