Amazing Grace Adams: The New York Times Bestseller and Read With Jenna Book Club Pick

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The bestseller lists have recently played host to some fabulously flawed and self-sabotaging midlife heroines: think of the acerbic Martha in Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss or indomitable Elizabeth Zott in Bonnie Garmus’s megahit Lessons in Chemistry. In the opening pages, the protagonist of Fran Littlewood’s debut novel is stuck in traffic gridlock in north London. we find out about a major thing that happened, and my heart just broke into a billion pieces and 100% understood why Grace, Ben, and Lottie acted and kept acting the way they did. A fictional narrative that springs from the author’s mother’s experience as a Vietnamese boat person, it’s impossible to describe without diminishing it. Along the way, Grace encounters obstacle after obstacle, but she is not going to let anything stop her.

She happened to do so the same day she booked her wedding to her husband — they share three kids — and dropped her daughter off at school. Grace is a polyglot who has just proven how amazing she is by winning the title of ’Polyglot of the Year. Grace Adams is in her forties, perimenopausal, a broken woman who used to be amazing, a genius polyglot, with a life seemingly brimful of potential. Traffic still isn’t moving, and she has a cake that she absolutely needs to pick up, so Grace does something pretty amazing, if not necessarily a great idea, overall.The cake is what will rescue their crumbling relationship, it has to, everything in her feels this to her very core. The author mentions in her parting note that this plot is inspired by the movie ‘Falling Down’, so perhaps fans of that movie might like to give this a try. Amazing Grace Adams took me a while to read because I had a very busy week, but also because I felt no motivation to pick this up and continue it. I found this book really easy to read and even though the author moved around in time she used this to good effect and it linked to the story. Had I stopped and restarted my rating may have suffered while I tried to reboot my brain and get back in the rhythm of things.

I wanted to make her a little bit extraordinary, which is why I kind of gave her this polyglot angle.

Unfortunately as she walks, life keeps getting in her way and Grace becomes more and more distraught and agitated. This book made me laugh and cry a heart warming story of motherhood and dealing with grief and trauma. From the first hot minute when Grace Adams, stalled in traffic, stuck in her car, simply opens the door and walks away from it all—into her day, the single day that gathers all her days up to this tipping point at the middle, she had me. A second narrative strand, covering the prior few months, unspools some of the incidents that have alienated mother and daughter. The journey of self discovery is either very haphazard akin to burnout or one of no matter how low Grace is knocked down, she gets right back up and keeps going.

Like Falling Down, Amazing Grace Adams takes place over the course of a single, spectacularly bad day. By the time a flashback tells us about a heartbreaking event that Grace has faced, we've wondered for most of the book why Grace is often out of control.One hot summer day, stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter's sixteenth birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. This story spans a day, detailing how her life fell apart, going back and forth in time, from the time 2 decades ago when she first met her husband, Ben, gave birth to her daughter, Lotte, the loss of career opportunities, right up to the present, where she is facing divorce and an estranged 16 year old daughter who lives with Ben, and refusing to speak to her. Heartbreaking: This story deals with a sexual predator at her daughter school who gets involved with Lotte and three other unsuspecting students.