Books & Java

Five Days Left

by Julie Lawson Timmer

Synopsis:

 
A heart-wrenching debut about two people who must decide how much they’re willing to sacrifice for love.
 
Mara Nichols, a successful lawyer, and devoted wife and adoptive mother, has recently been diagnosed with a terminal disease. Scott Coffman, a middle school teacher, has been fostering an eight-year-old boy while the boy’s mother serves a jail sentence. Scott and Mara both have five days left until they must say good-bye to the ones they love the most. Through their stories, Julie Lawson Timmer explores the individual limits of human endurance, the power of relationships, and that sometimes loving someone means holding on, and sometimes it means letting go.

My Review:

I am in awe of writers who can so eloquently yet simply convey every emotion in one book without focusing and dwelling on one emotion. How many times have I read books that are happy or sad or both but overall are just concentrated on these two emotions. This book by an amazingly talented new writer every emotion is felt by the reader through the experiences the characters go through in 5 days.

Mara is a high-powered lawyer whose life has always been about challenging herself, taking risks and being successful at just about everything she undertakes. She is in control of everything in her life. Until she is handed a death-sentence and is diagnosed with Huntington's Disease. A slow but aggressive neurological disease that causes the body and brain to shut down over time rendering the person incapable of any muscle control until they reach a vegetative state and die. There is no cure. Mara is devastated at the thought of losing any and all control of herself and her life. Not so much for her but for the burden she will be to everyone she loves. So, her only way to take back control of her life, she decides to control her death and not wait until HD determines her premature death for her. We are introduced to Mara 5 days before her 43rd birthday and we are a witness to her emotional resolve: anger, desperation, sadness, love, happiness, frustration, humiliation, self-loathing, injustice, etc.

The secondary story is that of Scott. A thirty-something married man living in Michigan and teaching in the inner city of Detroit. He has agreed to assume guardianship of 7 year old Curtis. His mother is sent to prison on a drug charge and he has no family to care for him. In the year's time Scott grows to love Curtis as his own. Through difficult and challenging times he earns the boy's respect. His wife is now expecting their first child and does not want to permanently assume responsibility for Curtis. When Curtis' mother is released and takes Curtis back Scott is devastated and torn between the right and wrong and his selfish and selfless reasons for not giving Curtis up. Like with Mara, we are introduced to Scott five days before he is to relinquish custody of Curtis to his mother.

What I loved most about this book is that there were no good and/or bad characters just good and bad circumstances that were indifferent to what is fair in the world. However, what I took from their stories is that life does not come in a neatly wrapped package. There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is just a life - here and now. And, fairness neither plays a part nor determines the outcomes. One would think (and I was reluctant to read this book at first because I don't understand suicide) that a book about a person planning their own death would be sad and depressing; but it wasn't. Not at all. Mara's character is brave and selfless and yes of course unfairly cut short but she was real. Reading her letters to Tom and Laks really made me smile and for me took a normally selfish act and turned it into a happy and just ending.

I would love to meet this author in person and tell her just what a beautiful and emotionally charged book this was for me. This why I love reading so much and I can't wait to read more.