The Goodbye Quilt: My Review

The Goodbye Quilt

About the Book:

Linda Davis's local fabric shop is a place where women gather to share their creations: quilts commemorating important events in their lives. Wedding quilts, baby quilts, memorial quilts—each is bound tight with dreams, hopes and yearnings.

Now, as her only child readies for college, Linda is torn between excitement for Molly and heartache for herself. Who will she be when she is no longer needed in her role as mom? What will become of her days? Of her marriage?

Mother and daughter decide to share one last adventure together—a cross-country road trip to move Molly into her dorm. As they wend their way through the heart of the country, Linda stitches together the scraps that make up Molly's young life. And in the quilting of each bit of fabric—the hem of a christening gown, a snippet from a Halloween costume—Linda discovers that the memories of a shared journey can come together in a way that will keep them both warm in the years to come….

My Thoughts:

Sometimes I will say about a book "It was exactly what I expected when I picked it up" and when I picked up this Susan Wiggs novel, I pretty much figured that even if I didn't say that in this review, I would be able to.     I was wrong.  Instead of a book that was a sweet pleasant afternoon diversion I got a book that touched my heart.  Maybe it is because like Linda, I have a child on the cusp of adulthood (though unlike her, I have a six year old, and many more years of motherhood to go).  

I loved everything about the book.  It is a love story--but the love is the love of a mother for her daughter.  There is romance--the romance between the daughter headed for a selective university across the country and the sweet hometown boy who will never be anything but a hometown boy and the romance between Mom and Dad, a love that Linda cherishes and is a little afraid of losing now that parenting is done.  As Linda stitches on the memory quilt (a quilt made of fabric from clothes significant to certain times and events of Molly's childhood) she shares the stories with Molly, who can't remember most of them.  

The story is told in the first person by Linda and I loved hearing her tell her story.  She's a woman who had dreams of going to college but her family didn't support those dreams and when Mr. Wonderful asked her to marry him, college soon fell by the wayside.  She's spent the last eighteen years caring for her family, and is now wondering what the future will hold.  She muses about her past and her future and over the course of their cross country trip learns to accept that her daughter is now an adult and does not need (or want) her to fix things that go wrong.

The Goodbye Quilt is a beautifully written book I'd highly recommend to any woman facing an empty nest.  Grade: A 

I'd like to thank the publisher for making a review copy available via NetGalley.  I was not obligated to write any review, much less a positive one.