Count the Ways: A Novel

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts
fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden
bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and
a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks
to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always
wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and
the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the
brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used
to, they have something that matters more. Their family.

Then comes a
terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor
is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam
finds solace with a new young partner. 

Over the decades
that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising
discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear
them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of
one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce
Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its
past, and find redemption in its darkest hours.

A story of holding
on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful,
poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and
forgiveness.