I'm giving three stars instead of four because it's not the most thought provoking book in the world but it was certainly a nice way to spend a few days.

Big city New York city photographer, a little down on her luck, a little older than she'd like to admit, decides to spend a year in the country and meets a few charming small town people and finds inspiration.

Her financial woes will feel familiar to many, her reflections on marriage and life ring true and while some plot points are a little fanciful it was still all around a nice book.

A very quick read and quite enjoyable. ( )

I like Anna Quindlen's writing but this book was slow going for me. The characters seemed stereotyped ... the country bumpkins and the city slickers...and the way all the issues were resolved felt a little too predictable. It's not that the story is bad, I think I had high expectations. ( )

Yet another wonderful book written by this superb author! It was a lovely soft read. Rebeca is broke; her artwork is obtained via photography. Her best selling work was titled Still Life With Bread Crumbs. It was wonderful when the money was flowing in, but now, the money doesn't flow, it drips. When she moves to a rented cabin deep in the woods, her life is changed substantially.

Gone is the stress of New York City, which is where she lived for many years. Amid the quiet days and nights, and the softly falling snow, she gently opens her heart to a man whose income is from construction and roofing. He is much younger than she is, but he is kind and very sensitive.

This is a feel good, happy ending book, and it is perfect for an afternoon of reading which staying in pajamas.

Four Stars. ( )

I really love Anna Quindlen. She tells a story in such a light and easy way that you can be fooled into thinking it has no deeper meaning, but then when it is done you realize there was a lot of meat beneath the contemporary styling. [b:Still Life with Bread Crumbs|17884042|Still Life with Bread Crumbs|Anna Quindlen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403168088l/17884042._SX50_.jpg|25047176] is the story of 60 year old divorcee Rebecca Winter, who has enjoyed a life as a recognized artist (photographer--which of course appeals to me), but whose career is on the wane and whose income can no longer keep up with her expenses. To that end, she rents her New York apartment and goes to live in a rural cabin that sounds cozy in the rental advertisement but turns out to be very rural indeed.

The story develops so naturally that you are mostly swept along, experiencing the loneliness and the learning experience with Rebecca and relating to the things she learns about herself. I can certainly relate to having your life turned upside down, since mine has been topsy-turvy for a while now. Of course, different reasons and different experiences, but I know the grip of fear that comes with drastic changes, not really wanted ones, at sixty-plus. Rebecca finds herself not only evaluating her present, but evaluating her past. Some of what she finds isn't to her liking.

Her biography had all the trappings of sophistication but no actual sophistication at all.

Just the kind of pithy remark Quindlen makes that says so much about her characters.

People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it. No matter what Tad might think about her skill at adaptation, it was hard to know how to do that.

The right book at the right time for me. ( )

I vaguely remember buying this book at a used book shop, mostly because the cover was gorgeous and to a lesser extent, because I'd read Anna Quindlen's book of essays How Reading Changed My Life and rationalised that there was an outside chance I might like her fiction too - but really, I bought it for the cover.

Last night, I read the synopsis - because it's been so long since I bought it or looked at it again that I had no idea what it was about - and thought 'Oh hey, this sounds interesting.' I decided to try the first page, just to see if the writing was something that would hold my attention, and promptly read the first 5 chapters. It was a little sketchy at the start, because there's a scene involving a racoon that I'd have preferred not to have read, and having lived through exactly the same scenario, I cry bullshit on the resolution, but it was a quick scene and not gratuitous.

Midway through though, I was having second thoughts. The writing is what I'm going to describe as 'extreme third person POV'; an omniscient narrator who sometimes jumps from one person's comments or thoughts about a character to asides that reveal what that other character was really thinking or doing or what was motivating them. It was both interesting, because the reader gets all the facts about what's really going on beneath the surface, and jarring. One aside, set in a parenthetical, was over a page long. At this point it felt like speculative fiction, and I thought ... 3 stars.

But then things started coming together, and by that I means the two main characters come together - and kudos to the author for turning the May/September dynamic on its ear without any equivocation. I didn't care so much about the romance aspect, but it was at that point that so many divergent stories started to come together into something resembling coherence, and it made me want to stick with the story. I'm glad I did, because it ended up being an enjoyable story with a satisfactorily happy ending. I'm a fan of the device Quendlen used, where the end of the book jumps forward in time to give a quick summary of where everyone's lives ended up; I like the sense of pleasant finality it imparts to the reader, even if it is unrealistic.

I'm not sure I'd read more of her work - but if I do run across any more of it, I'd definitely consider it. ( )