Book Review: "Welcome Home, Stranger" by Kate Christensen

Bleak and emotional, but beautifully written, Welcome Home, Stranger is a story about the scars we bear from our family, the resentments and misunderstandings we never voice, and the feeling that our lives are headed in directions we never wanted or expected.

“There are two ways to look at your family. The first way, the so-called normal way, is that you owe them everything just because you’re related. But I believe that you owe them nothing even though you’re related. It’s not obligatory, it’s voluntary.”

Rachel is an award-winning environmental journalist who is more comfortable with research and science than interaction. When her estranged mother dies, she returns home to Maine for the first time in a number of years, she’s hit with a wall of unpleasant memories and the resentment of her sister Celeste, who cared for their mother in her last days.

Both sisters must come to terms with the loss of a woman who viewed her daughters as competition for her and pitted them against one another. Rachel is also dealing with the inevitable loss of her job, reuniting with an old boyfriend, and a health crisis for her ex-husband. Meanwhile, Celeste also wants more out of the life she’s feeling stifled in.

For a relatively short book, the pacing was a little slow. There’s so much crisis and angst in this book and very little to truly be joyful about, so it was difficult to read at times. But ultimately, I think the message the book conveyed was that there is always hope.