Still Life with Bread Crumbs, by Anna Quindlen

I've just read Anna Quindlen's first and latest novels, one right after the other. Her first novel was Object Lessons, which I mentioned briefly in this post, and her latest novel is Still Life with Bread Crumbs. It was fun reading them successively and I noted a great improvement in her writing. This latest book is much more polished than her first, although I liked that one quite a bit as well.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs is about Rebecca Winter, sixty years old, who is a well-known photographer, but who has fallen on hard times. She has resorted to renting her New York apartment out so she can use the income to support her mother's retirement home fee and her own, much cheaper, rented home in a small town in upstate New York. Once there, her life takes on a slower pace than she's used to. She begins to make friends in town, and a romance blossoms with Jim Bates, who offers her a weekend job taking photographs of birds for the Wildlife Service. In the meantime, she wanders the woods surrounding her new home, taking pictures of what seem like memorial crosses that someone's been leaving all over the woods.

During the course of the year that Rebecca spends in her new home, she comes to appreciate the slower pace of her new life. She faces many challenges, including her father's death, and a misunderstanding with Jim, and she learns that she is a dog person, adopting a stray named Jack.

One of the things that I like about Anna Quindlen's writing as that she creates realistic characters. They're believable, they make and learn from their mistakes, and they're easy to root for. I have a sense when reading her books that things will always work out somehow for the characters. In that sense maybe they're a little unrealistic, but it's hard not to like that.

Anna Quindlen. Still Life with Bread Crumbs. New York: Random House, 2014. 256 pages. ISBN 9781400065752.