I found this novel to be very slow at times but poignant with subject of the story. It is astory about a wife and mother who is dying of a brain tumor and the reaction of her husband and daughter. ( )

Chenoweth explores how a husband and 19 year old daughter react to the news that their mother, Helen, a vibrant attorney has a tumor in her brian which will kill her in less than a year. The character resonate as true and are multi-dimensional. Pig's (the cat) reaction to the change in house and his ultimate dismissal was heartbreaking. ( )

This is a poignant novel about a woman suffering from brain cancer with a limited number of months to live. Her husband and college-age daughter spend a weekend in a luxury hotel in New Hampshire and are joined by a number of couples from their past who have all come to be with them. It is a moving look into end-of-life issues and how family and friends deal with a devastating diagnosis. ( )

A friend recommended this and the subject (a family where the wife is dying of cancer and the teenage girl is beginning romantic relationships) seemed right up my alley, but I ended up skimming most of it. After reading Yglesias's A Happy Marriage, another book like this is an anticlimax. Plus the scenes and the dialogue seemed trivial and the writing unexceptional. ( )

Published in The Oregonian. By Cheryl Strayed

The opening chapter of Emily Chenoweth’s grave and compelling first novel,
Hello Goodbye, begins ordinarily enough: a forty-four year old woman named Helen is in her kitchen making coffee. By chapter’s end, she’s on the floor, literally seeing stars. Stars, it turns out, that aren’t born of a momentary dizziness, but a brain tumor that will soon end her life.

The rest of Hello Goodbye concerns itself with a single week in August, six months after that fall, when Helen and her husband Elliott and their eighteen-year-old daughter Abby take one last vacation together, at a fancy hotel in the New Hampshire woods. Under the guise of celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, Elliott has also invited his and Helen’s oldest and best friends to join them—and they do, arriving throughout the week to honor the occasion, but mostly to see Helen and say goodbye.

Chenoweth guides us exquisitely through those seven days, offering up a story that is equal parts riveting and real, tender and merciless. Her characters are utterly convincing, human in their complexity and contradiction, their bravado and fragility. In chapters that alternate among the three family members, we peer deeply into their psyches and lives, their fears and delusions and deepest desires.

There is Elliott, the loving and dedicated husband, who alone knows the entire truth of Helen’s grim prognosis, yet can scarcely allow himself to skitter across the surface of his growing understanding of the enormous loss to come. There is Abby, clinging desperately to her mother at the very time in her life that she feels naturally compelled to pull away. Through them we come to know the rich cast of characters who pass through their lives in that intense week. There are the old friends, who respond to the fact of Helen’s illness with emotions that range from sheer grief to denial. There are the strangers—young members of the hotel staff—who Abby seeks out in order to escape, however temporarily, the sorrow that has overtaken her life. And of course, there is Helen herself, the dying woman at the center of this novel. She’s the character around which all the others orbit, and yet, as the one who has no choice but to go, she’s off to the side, as if watching the sad and beautiful days from afar. By novel’s end, it’s her weakened voice that rises above all the others; she who manages the most consoling goodbye.

Perhaps what I admired most about Hello Goodbye was how deftly Chenoweth took on painful subject matter without sinking into either sentimentality or despair. Her gaze is unflinching, but her hand is light and though this novel is at times harrowing, it’s also a page-turner. This book broke my heart, but like all things capable of breaking our hearts, it has the spark of life. ( )