{"id":4111,"date":"2021-07-09T07:22:38","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T14:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4111"},"modified":"2021-07-09T07:22:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T14:22:38","slug":"caroline-b-cooney-the-grandmother-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/caroline-b-cooney-the-grandmother-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"Caroline B. Cooney: The Grandmother Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This was a blast of a read, akin to the kind of great caper novels written in the past by Donald Westlake, and more recently by talented writers like Jeff Cohen and Catriona McPherson.\u00a0 This is a caper novel with a broken heart at the center.\u00a0 While Westlake stuck pretty strictly to the caper element, Cooney brings the reader in emotionally as well.<\/p>\n

The story centers on sweet, stoner Freddy, who makes glass beads and pipes for a living, and who has ended up caring for his grandmother who has dementia.\u00a0 Freddy is a regular visitor to his grandmother\u2019s memory care home and knows the staff and patients well.\u00a0 He slips in the back door of the facility and doesn\u2019t sign in, doing this, like everything in his life, just off the grid.<\/p>\n

He lives in his grandmother\u2019s house, collects his dead mother\u2019s social security, and drives his grandfather\u2019s cars without a license and uninsured.\u00a0 Because he smokes so much weed his short-term memory is not always great and he\u2019s terrible with details, but he loves his grandmother and visits every day without fail.<\/p>\n

He takes her for walks in her wheelchair and agrees to be remembered as her long dead son, Arthur. He loves blowing glass and is clearly an artist.\u00a0 He takes his beads to bead shows and ekes out a bit of a living, though there\u2019s more money in the glass pipes he makes.\u00a0 He\u2019s gotten into a bit of trouble: a mover and shaker has asked Freddy to take him on as a \u201cpartner\u201d at bead shows, supplying Freddy\u2019s entry fees and travel expenses, but what he\u2019s really doing is having Freddy launder money for him.<\/p>\n

When Freddy first agreed he felt it was no big deal but now he wants out, and the man\u2019s goons are after him.\u00a0 There seems to be no way out from this terrible deal.\u00a0 When someone is murdered at his grandmother\u2019s memory care, Freddy is sure the goons are behind it, though everyone at\u00a0 the facility suspects the husband.<\/p>\n

Freddy\u2019s parallel universe of glass blowing \u2013 which supplies the action \u2013 and the universe of dementia patients at the memory care home work on parallel tracks to power the narrative. \u00a0One minute you\u2019re breaking your heart over the descriptions of the patients and what the families go through, the next Freddy is picking up someone\u2019s difficult, bite-y dog because that someone has been arrested.<\/p>\n

This book had humor, heart, and a great plot, and most of all it had Freddy, who, like all of us, is not only doing the best he can, but has his heart is in the right place.\u00a0 I ended the book with an appreciation for the love Freddy has for his grandmother but for the portrayal, on Cooney\u2019s part, of this difficult and heartbreaking aspect of aging.\u00a0 She\u2019s a clear-eyed storyteller and seems omnivorous in her interests.\u00a0 She\u2019s as interested in Freddy\u2019s glass blowing (you will be too) as she is in the details of caring for an aging relative, and what it might mean to have a goon on your tail. I was both surprised and delighted by the ending.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a blast of a read, akin to the kind of great caper novels written in the past by Donald Westlake, and more recently by talented writers like Jeff Cohen and Catriona McPherson.\u00a0 This is a caper novel with a broken heart at the center.\u00a0 While Westlake stuck pretty strictly to the caper element, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[485,608,626,627,625,414,624],"class_list":["post-4111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-caper","tag-caroline-b-cooney","tag-dog","tag-elderly","tag-glass-blowing","tag-poisoned-pen-press","tag-the-grandmother-plot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4112,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4111\/revisions\/4112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}