The penetrating and deeply moving story of a family in crisis and a friendship pushed to the breaking point: of two women forced to confront the limits, and the power, of their lifelong bond.
Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed — through Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth’s attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother’s act — their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz’s adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to engulf the family, the fault lines in the women’s friendship are revealed, and Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection.
Songs Without Words is about the sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest relationships, about the familial myths that shape us, and about the limits — and the power — of the friendships we create when we are young. It’s a novel of singular force and complexity: thoughtful, moving, and absolutely gripping.
“Engrossing, forgiving and quietly wise, Songs never makes a false step as Packer keeps both the pages and her readers’ minds turning until the very end.”
— People
“Compassionate, rich in solace … The extraordinary authority of Packer’s voice lies in her refusal to make heroes of the victims of mischance or villains out of the friends, lovers and family members who sometimes fail them.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Packer [is] an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. Songs Without Words touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today’s parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers … [It] shows us — tenderly, and with a full awareness of the precious dignity and indignity of human experience — ourselves.”
— Washington Post
“Subtle and complex … a compelling family drama about friendship, the past, guilt and unconscious patterns set in childhood. What’s most impressive about Songs is Packer’s ability to set a story in the wealthy and beautiful suburbs of San Francisco and make her characters’ suffering authentic … Packer makes us understand why life is simply harder for some people.”
— USA Today
“Evocative and convincing … An intriguing and well-written exploration of friendship, marriage, parenthood, and the notion that — to quote Flannery O’Connor — ‘it is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially.’”
— Boston Globe
“Packer has an unnerving ability to gaze steadily at feelings you can barely acknowledge even to yourself: self-pity in the midst of catastrophe … the sensual power of a mother’s love for her son. She interprets the subtle moves of Liz and Brody’s marriage with breathtaking clarity … She writes easily, like walking or breathing, pinpointing emotional truths without drawing attention to her skill. You are rarely aware of her, even as you become intimate with her characters. Even as those characters feel things they, and you, have never been able to articulate … These are secret universals, things widely felt but never mentioned … You are grateful for Packer’s insight, refreshed and comforted by the depth of her empathy.”
— Newsday
“As in The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, Packer makes the ripples from one act so involving, you can’t pull away.”
— Good Housekeeping
“Packer writes about adult female friendship with a nuanced understanding of its emotional intensity.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In her latest novel, Ann Packer beautifully evokes a troubled friendship between two women … [and she] is just brilliant on adolescent despair … There is such fragility in life, as Songs Without Words so vividly reminds us.”
— New York Daily News
“The wrenchingly tender Songs Without Words can only reinforce [Packer’s] reputation as America’s primary chronicler of disloyalty, the horrible dissolution of trust and its fraught rebuilding … Ms. Packer’s writing is at once graceful, kindhearted and clear-eyed, possessed of a forgiving spirit that transcends even the most hurtful transgressions … We’re lucky to have Ms. Packer to show us, in the sweetest possible way, how to both pardon and be pardoned.”
— Dallas Morning News
“Readers will be pleased to find Packer’s remarkable talent for characterization in the pages of her second novel … Commonplace events and everyday gestures reveal not only sorrow, but the complex, interior lives of characters … [The teenager] Lauren’s sections are pitch-perfect … It is Lauren who gives this novel its enormous heart.”
— Charlotte Observer
“A densely detailed portrait of contemporary life…[Packer] pitches family interactions gracefully—the explosive clashes and the subtle happinesses alike—and has a brilliant ear for character and dialogue.”
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A close and careful look at the bonds of friendship.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A novel of friendship so authentic and complex that one cannot read it without examining the subtleties of one’s own friendships … Ann Packer firmly establishes her position among today’s top writers of women’s fiction. Songs Without Words is one of the best books of the year.”
— Winston-Salem Journal