Amanda Eyre Ward’s follow up book to the marvelous The Jetsetters is wonderful! Funny, clever, heartbreaking, warm and yet uplifting, the saga of the Perkins family continues. In the Jetsetters we meet the family as they arrive on a cruise ship and basically air all their dysfunctional dirty laundry.
In Arrivals and Departures, we discover the family once again broken. Daughter Regan is now divorced and living in Greece with her two teenage daughters. Charlotte, their mother is living in a closed community eating cheese and Triscuits while babysitting her infamous daughter Lee who must be watched because she is so depressed she wants to find a way to end her life. And their brother Cord has begun hitting the bottle again much to the chagrin of his boyfriend. Cord now owns a company and is in the process of taking it public and has no time for anything expect perhaps wine. We find them all separated from each other in miles, as well as with each other all dealing with their own lives.
So now you are all caught up except you’re not. Regan has an on-line boyfriend who she has never seen or met who is bleeding her dry. Her children know it’s a scam and keep trying to tell her. She refuses to believe them. So, when they come home and find a note that she has gone to an artsy thing leaving them not only alone but untraceable by her phone they begin to panic. Worse, she doesn’t come back on the day she was supposed to.
They call their grandmother Charlotte, and she sends Lee to Greece. But Lee has decided she will never return to America after they find Regan. Meanwhile Cord’s boyfriend has taken him to a retreat to make him relax and taken his phone. Cord needs to drink so he decides to bust out and go visit his mother Charlotte who is not there as she has now gone to Greece to keep an eye on Lee but also find a lost love.
What could go wrong? Everything!
But as they all try and cope with their problems they all begin to realize just how important they all are to each other. What they truly want for each other is to be happy and content. They each need to learn life lessons in order to all come together as a family who can take care of not only each other, but they have to learn to take care of themselves and their own needs.
Arrivals and Departures is a true family love story as they all finally have the courage to address their pasts, make peace with their faults and become each other’s champions!
Thank you #NetGalley #BallentineBooks #AmandaEyreWard #ArrivalsandDepartures for the advanced copy.
Arrivals and Departures: A Novel: Ward, Amanda Eyre: 9780593500323: Amazon.com: Books
Amazon.com: The Jetsetters: A Novel: 9780399181894: Eyre Ward, Amanda: Books
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