Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg

From the Publisher

As Jay lies in a coma, his young wife, Lainey, is the only one who believes he will ever recover. When his doctors try to reach him, Jay does not respond. Yet Lainey believes he knows when she is there, and is stimulated by the gifts of ordinary life she brings him: sweet-smelling flowers, his children's drawings, his own softly textured shirt. As Lainey struggles to keep believing and to keep the family going, she goes deeper into herself, looking for solace, for strength, and for understanding. Overburdened, distracted, depressed yet determined, she feels desperate only at those times when her faith falters. It is then that she is sustained by her friendships. Alice, her next-door neighbor, is strong when Lainey cannot be, though she has problems and secret fears of her own. And the spirit of Evie, a woman from the 1940s who used to live in Lainey's house, now takes up a kind of residence again, offering advice and philosophy from a simpler time.

Library Journal

Readers who thought The Bridges of Madison County was a romantic book should try this story of honest and enduring love from the author of Talk Before Sleep (LJ 3/15/94). The first-person narrative describes an ordinary woman caught up in unusual circumstances. Lainey is a wife/mother/office worker whose life is suddenly changed when her husband is sent into a coma by a freak accident. The only one who believes that he will one day wake up, she visits him daily, bringing him stimulus from everyday life in an attempt to reach him. "I line up the little spice bags all across his chest. All across his University of California T-shirt are requests from the kitchen. Come back, says the curry, the oregano. And me." Lainey is sustained through her ordeal by the support of two special women: Alice, who lives next door, and Evie, the ghost of the woman who lived in Lainey's house in the Forties. A touching and enjoyable read, this novel is romantic without being a romance. Highly recommended for popular fiction collections.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.

BookList

Berg's impeccable prose gives voice to that element in our psyche that enables us to cope with the impossible. In her last novel, "Talk before Sleep" , the impossible was terminal cancer. Here tragedy is tinged with a painful sense of the absurd: the narrator's husband, Jay, is hit on the head by ice falling off a building, an accident that sends him into a coma. Lainey loves Jay with her whole heart and refuses even to consider the possibility that this condition could lead inexorably toward death. Lainey goes to the nursing home every day, bringing Jay flowers, his favorite clothes, and their two confused young daughters. And she talks to him, touches him, tries to draw him back to the world of the living. At home, Lainey tempers her fear with fantasies about an all-knowing "ghost woman" who encourages her to be strong. In less capable hands, this story line would be unbearably mawkish, but Berg writes on a higher plane. We can't control life, Berg tells us, but it sure helps to have faith.

What People Are Saying

LaVyrle Spencer
Elizabeth Berg takes us on a journey where love hurts, then heals. Anyone who has loved...don't miss this book.

Mary Kay Blakely
A love story that tells the truth about women and men...explores the rich terrain of women's friendships, the intricacies of motherhood, the complex passions of family.

Barbara Levear Aschler
Elizabeth Berg has written a beautiful book steeped with grace, wit, and compassion...if you read one book this year, let it be this one. If you read one book next year, re-read it.

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