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What We Keep cover art

What We Keep

Written by: Elizabeth Berg
Narrated by: Stephanie Roberts
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Publisher's Summary

Ginny Young is on a plane en route to see her mother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for 35 years. She thinks back to the summer of 1958, when she and her sister, Sharla, were young girls. Moving back and forth in time between the girl she once was and the woman she's become, Ginny at last confronts painful choices that occur in almost any woman's life and learns surprising truths about the people she thought she knew best.

©2002 Elizabeth Berg (P)2002 AudioGO

What listeners say about What We Keep

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Pretty Good!

I enjoyed this book, although the end was less than desirable. By this I mean that it ended rather abruptly. The overall story was really good and I enjoyed listening to the narrator.

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This book touched me

I found that the mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships were believably multi-faceted. Loyalty within family was examined in a way that resonated with me.

The characters were lively; the narrator great to listen to. I was a little sad when this story ended. I would have liked to hear more from each of the characters and how their lives unfolded over time.

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  • Overall
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Intriguing story and story telling

Such beautiful story telling and an interesting perspective. However at some times I felt I was reading a young adult novel a few of the childhood scenes seemed to drag on. But overall I loved the format and would recommend the book.

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An Amazing Story!!

I loved listening to What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg. The story is so detailed and captivating. I could not stop listening! It’s about two young sisters, the closest of friends, and how their lives are deeply changed when their mother leaves the family to “find herself”. They grow up, go to college, get married and have careers, leading successful and happy lives, but never seeing their mother for 35 years. The story is written as a reflection of her life as one of the sisters, flies across the country to California, to meet her sister and finally to see her mother. An exquisitely narrated story and one I will definitely recommend to my friends.

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An insult

What We Keep, in which we meet a woman going to visit her mother for the first time in 35 years, who she and her sister cut out of their lives when they were teens because of an unforgivably heinous crime she apparently committed against them back then. Over the next few hundred pages, claiming to have a photographic memory, she proceeds to describe in aching detail what, in anyone's terms, would be an idyllic, free-wheeling childhood with a doting, loving, omnipresent caring mother and a father, who is, although largely absent due to his job, as was the norm in the US in the 1980s, a decent man who loves his wife and his children. Given all this virtue, I kept wondering who the mother murdered, or what terrible crime she might have committed to warrant being so suddenly and severely cut off from her daughters' and grandchildren's lives so completely. The answer to this question, when it finally arrives, is this: she committed the unforgivable act of divorcing her husband. Did she then abandon her children or screw her former husband out of massive amounts of money? No, she rented a small flat where she made a lovely bedroom for her girls, and began to earn her own living by making and selling her own art. This book is an insult to anyone who's ever been a daughter, or a mother, or, in fact, a human being. Disgusting.

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