Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

 My list of Popsugar categories is steadily getting smaller and smaller. With just four categories left out of the original forty, I chose to tackle the "book set around a holiday other than Christmas" prompt next. I had to head online for suggestions on this one, as I had no clue what to read for it. I found what I was looking for in the Popsugar Goodreads group. Someone suggested Labor Day by Joyce Maynard, and I just happened to have that novel loaded into my Kindle already. I randomly downloaded it when it was on sale for a few bucks on Amazon a little while back and then forgot that I owned it (a hazard of owning books that you can't see sitting on your shelf). As the title suggests, the story is set over a Labor Day weekend. Pleased that I already had a book that would work for this challenge, I dove in.

Labor Day tells the story of thirteen-year-old Henry Johnson. He lives alone with his mother Adele in a rural New England town. His parents are divorced, and he sees his father, stepmother, and step-siblings once a week for an awkward family dinner. Aside from those days, it's just him and his mom, which isn't an easy life, because his mother suffers from a mental illness. She only leaves the house when absolutely necessary and alternates between being sad and paranoid most of the time. She and Henry subsist on canned and frozen foods, which Henry has to shop for alone while she waits in the car. She works a part-time job over the phone, which she can only bear to do sometimes because of the social interaction required. Because of her issues, Henry spends much of his time attempting to cheer her up and take care of the house. There is no shortage of love and care between Henry and Adele, but their lives are very lonely and abnormal. Henry knows this, and worries about things quite a bit.

The action of the story begins over Labor Day weekend. School is about to begin again and Henry's recent growth spurt has forced a rare shopping trip to the local Price Mart. While perusing the store, a strange man approaches Henry and asks for help. He's hurt his ankle and cut his leg in an accident, he explains, and wants a ride back to their house to patch himself up. He says that Henry and Adele look like just the people he needs to help him. Henry and his mom are suspicious, but they agree to help the man, whose name, as they soon learn, is Frank. Before long he tells them the truth of his situation. He has just escaped from prison and needs a place to lay low for awhile.

Adele and Henry drive Frank back to their house, where things quickly become complicated. Frank explains that he was serving a prison sentence for murder, which is obviously alarming, but his kind and respectful manner wins over the hearts of both mother and son. Adele and Henry have essentially become Frank's hostages, but they have been so lonely for so long that they are starved for the presence of a husband and father in their lives. Over the course of the long holiday weekend, Frank steps up to that father figure role, making home repairs, cooking real meals, and playing games of catch in the backyard with Henry. He and Adele fall in love and begin having a sexual relationship. Soon, they start making plans to take Henry and disappear to Canada.

Henry, who had previously been enjoying Frank's fatherly companionship and influence on his mother, begins to feel more conflicted about their living situation as these plans to move are discussed. He becomes concerned that the pair might eventually leave him behind, or that his mother will start to love Frank more than him. He considers turning Frank into the police, who have maintained a very public manhunt for him since his escape. As the weekend progresses and their plans to move become more solid, Henry has to sort out his feelings about his mother and Frank and decide on his course of action. Will he stick with this new and highly unorthodox family arrangement that seems to bring his mother so much happiness, or force a return to the old lonely days where it's just him and Adele against the world?

Going into this novel, I expected it to be like a Lifetime movie - high on intrigue and short on substance. After reading, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the amount of subtlety and depth that Maynard created. The characters of Adele and Henry were very well-written, with lots of characterization that made me feel for them. The idea of a woman falling in love with an escaped convict over the course of a few days sounds ludicrous on its face, but the background Maynard gives her, the mental illness, and the intense loneliness that she grapples make the story almost believable. Henry's pain and inner turmoil over his mother's depression and his own sense of isolation is similarly beautifully described. He is an unreliable narrator due to his age, and his preteen view of the world adds a lot of poignancy to the story. Frank's background was also very well drawn, with enough shades of gray included in his backstory to make you question how much of a criminal he actually was. This was a story full of very dysfunctional people, but everyone within it was struggling with difficult emotions common to everyone. I was drawn right into the story and finished it in just a few days.

Labor Day was a great little novel and it raised a lot of questions in my mind. I love books that make me think, and this one did just that. It wasn't high literature, but it was much better than I was expecting. I'm going to have to seek out more of Maynard's work in the future when I'm in the mood for a fast-paced and emotional read. I'm glad that my Popsugar Challenge led me to give this author a try.


Challenge Tally
Popsugar Challenge: (a book set around a holiday other than Christmas) 37/40
TBR Challenge (previously owned): 34/60

Total Books Read in 2017: 44