We Are All Welcome Here, by Elizabeth Berg

I love Elizabeth Berg. Her novels are sentimental and sweet and so very girlie, but I love them. I'm not an emotional-response-crier kind of girl, but hers almost always get me, and We Are All Welcome Here is no exception. It's a departure for Berg, in that she based it on the real life of the mother of one of her readers. The reader sent a letter suggesting this, a thing that Berg was initially against, but then was won over by the sheer force of the mother's story. She states in the introduction that it's a fictionalized version of the woman's story, but the grounding in reality is perhaps one of the reasons the book is so good.

It was a pretty quick read, with a young girl as narrator. Her mother, Paige, who contracted polio late in her pregnancy, delivered the baby in an iron lung, and then lived to come home and raise her, albeit from a paralyzed state, able only to move her head. Paige is determined to focus on what she can do, not what she is unable to do anymore, with the help of a special caregiver, whose boyfriend is caught up in the civil rights movement. We follow her daughter as she hits puberty, pushes boundaries, and begins to understand what love is and isn't.

Berg has such a skill at capturing the almost excruciatingly unbearable moments in life, whether of tragedy or love, and I think this is why I like her books so much. It's so easy to identify with those moments where you think you just can't stand whatever it is, whether it's good or bad.

The first Elizabeth Berg book that made me cry is Range of Motion, which I highly recommend, along with this one.