Book Reviews
Anna Quindlen is America’s Resident Sane Person. She has what Joyce called the common touch, the ability to speak to many people about what’s on their minds before they have the vaguest idea what’s on their minds.
New York Times
A well-told story of love and redemption, one that is not based on the passion of a man for a woman but on the affection and understanding that develops between people of very different backgrounds who are brought together by a baby named Faith and a house called Blessings.
Washington Post Book World
Quindlen finds a wealth of material in the juxtaposition of two very different lives, moving between lush descriptions of a faille dress in a Park Avenue club library and the incongruous smell of baby wipes in a dive bar. These satisfying details heighten the reader's emotional stake in Skip and Lydia's subtly drawn relationship.
Vogue
The writing is lovely, and some of the insights into human nature are breathtaking. But when the real world does finally intrude and the tranquillity of Blessings is broken, Quindlen sends her characters down improbable paths; suddenly they are acting, reacting and speaking in ways that seem oddly out of sync with the personalities she has developed. Still, there are great pleasures to be had in reading this novel, particularly its lambent prose.
Book Magazine
Venturing into fictional territory far from the blue-collar neighborhoods of Black and Blue and other works, Quindlen's immensely appealing new novel is a study in social contrasts and of characters whose differences are redeemed by the transformative power of love. The eponymous Blessings is a stately house now gone to seed, inhabited by Mrs. Blessing, an 80-year-old wealthy semirecluse with an acerbic tongue and a reputation for hanging on to every nickel. Widowed during WWII, Lydia Blessing was banished to her socially prominent family's country estate for reasons that are revealed only gradually. Austere, unbending and joyless, Lydia has no idea, when she hires young Skip Cuddy as her handyman, how her life and his are about to change. Skip had promise once, but bad companions and an absence of parental guidance have led to a stint in the county jail. When Skip stumbles upon a newborn baby girl who's been abandoned at Blessings, he suddenly has a purpose in life. With tender devotion, he cares secretly for the baby for four months, in the process forming a bond with Mrs. Blessing, who discovers and admires his clandestine parenting skills. A double betrayal destroys their idyll. As usual, Quindlen's fine-tuned ear for the class distinctions of speech results in convincing dialogue. Evoking a bygone patrician world, she endows Blessings with an almost magical aura. While it skirts sentimentality by a hairbreadth, the narrative is old-fashioned in a positive way, telling a dramatic story through characters who develop and change, and testifying to the triumph of human decency when love is permitted to grow and flourish.
Publishers Weekly
Quindlen's short, sentimentally sweet new novel is ultimately unsatisfying. The wealthy and reclusive 80-year-old Lydia Blessing lives in the eponymous "Blessings," the country estate to which she was banished by her family after the death of her husband in World War II. Two events conspire to change the remaining years of Lydia's life: she hires twentysomething Skip Cuddy as a handyman, and a baby is abandoned on her doorstep. Skip, whose friendship with some local lowlifes led to a stint in jail, tries to hide the existence of the baby from his prickly and critical employer, to no avail. Both Skip and Lydia fall in love with the baby, whom they name Faith, and in spite of their misgivings come together as a makeshift family. But after four months, their secret is revealed, and Faith is taken away. Quindlen's talent for realistic dialog can't overcome the melodramatic plot and one-dimensional characters. Of course, her fans will want to read this, but don't go overboard on the number you purchase. —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal
Fourth adult novel from Newsweek columnist Quindlen, a story of lost souls redeemed by love. A friend of Lydia Blessing's once told her that there was a secret at the heart of every family and-predictably-it's revealed that the Blessing family had dark secrets to spare. Eighty years old when the story begins, Lydia lives more in the past than present, haunted by memories. Her handsome, ne'er-do-well, secretly homosexual brother Sunny was a shotgun suicide; and Lydia's long-ago marriage to Sunny's best friend Ben Carton was a sham (madly in love with Sunny, Ben obligingly married his sister, though she was pregnant by another man, then conveniently died in WWII). Her charming father had evidently married her cold and disapproving mother mostly for money, and it turns out that Ethel Blessing, to all appearances a staunch Episcopalian, was actually Jewish. The family shuttled between Blessings, the enormous house on the vast New England estate that her father called his gentleman's farm, and a Manhattan townhouse. Lydia and her brother attended the right schools, wore the right clothes, socialized with the right people, etc. Hoping to conceal the true paternity of her redheaded granddaughter (no, Ben really couldn't manage sex with a woman), Ethel packed Lydia off to the Blessings, where she raised her daughter Meredith more or less alone and otherwise observed the rules and routines of upper-class WASPs. And so the decades rolled by and now Lydia makes do with the company of her cranky Korean housekeeper and the estate caretaker, Skip Cuddy, a drifter with a heart of gold who lives in the shabby apartment over her five-car garage. Nothing much changes—until a newborn baby is left on the doorstep. The caretaker moves her to his dresser drawer, figures out how to feed her, and names her Faith. And Lydia is shaken out of her genteel torpor at last. As soap-opera-parable with old-fashioned contrivances: comfortable, not Quindlen's best.
Kirkus Reviews