Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood

The September Read with Jenna pick, Amazing Grace Adams is a wonderful, funny, well-written, empathetic story about a woman who has reached her breaking point, with her daughter, her husband, her work and everyone she encounters on that fateful day in which everything that can go wrong, does. The relatable story is filled with emotions everyone can relate to, anger, embarrassment, mistakes and a love so deep and desperate you would do anything to try and fix it and make it better. It’s about never being able to come back from loss, but at least trying to live and deal with the sadness openly. It’s about the good, the bad and the ugly of life and finally saying enough is enough.

Grace Adams is having a very, very bad day. She’s stuck in traffic trying to get to a bakery across town so she can pick up a 16th birthday cake for her daughter Lotte who does not want to have anything to do with her anymore, let alone see her.

So, feeling she has no choice, she gets out of her car, leaving it in the traffic and begins the long walk to find the bakery and make it to a birthday party which she is not wanted at. As she tries to maneuver through the different and difficult moments getting to the bakery, she begins to relive her life and assess what she has done right and wrong. At 45, and being perimenopausal, sweating at the drop of a hat, she relives what has led up to her husband wanting a divorce, her daughter moving out to live with her father and being fired all because she can’t seem to open her mouth. She can’t explain her feelings, so she just shoves them deeper and deeper into a vault she has never opened before.

As her life during the walk explodes around her and as she explodes on everyone she unfortunately encounters, Grace realizes she has become a person she does not know or understand. How and why did her life take such horrible twists and turns.

But by the time she finally makes it to the bakery to get the cake and brings it to Lotte’s birthday party, a party she was told NOT to attend, she is a new Grace, determined to make up for the mistakes she felt she has made , to love more deeply especially to love herself and try to be the woman she knows she wants to be, not the person who everyone around her wants her to be.

Amazing Grace Adams will make you smile, tear up but also make you realize how human everyone really is and make you admire Grace Adams for what she was able to do during that long difficult day, and perhaps we all could learn from her how to react when we make mistakes, or when we don’t speak out mind. She teaches us that no matter what you need to pull yourself up, experience the feelings, learn from them and grow. This is peace…

Courtesy of HOLT Social Media, here are some cute mobile backgrounds for your phone to fit the fun mood this book brings out, along with a delicious cake recipe!