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    The Breakdown Lane
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    The Breakdown Lane
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    The Breakdown Lane
    Ebook476 pages7 hours

    The Breakdown Lane

    By Jacquelyn Mitchard

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Twelve Times Blessed comes a novel of the breakdown of a family and of healing after a loss

    Giving advice is what Julianne Ambrose Gillis does for a living—every Sunday she doles it out to clueless people she doesn’t know, in a column in her local Wisconsin paper. But when it comes to her personal life, Julie seems to have no insight whatsoever. She has worked hard to keep her marriage fresh and to be a good mother, so it’s a mystery when Leo, her husband of twenty years, decides to defect from their life together and their three children: Gabe, Caroline and Aury.

    In his absence, Julie is diagnosed with a serious illness, which drives her children to undertake a dangerous journey to find Leo—before it’s too late. But what they discover about their father is even more devastating than their mother’s deteriorating health.

    As the known world sinks precariously from view and leaves them all adrift, the Gillis clan must navigate their way through the trenches of love, guilt and betrayal, back to solid ground and a new definition of family.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061842092
    Author

    Jacquelyn Mitchard

    New York Times bestseller Jacquelyn Mitchard's novels include The Deep End of the Ocean, Twelve Times Blessed, and The Breakdown Lane. She is also the author of The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, a collection of her newspaper columns. She lives with her husband and six children in Madison, Wisconsin.

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    Reviews for The Breakdown Lane

    4/5

    64 ratings11 reviews

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    • 1/5
      That book is the best,i would ride one more time
    • 5/5
      Must read Full Stop! This is one of those books you never forget because somewhere in there is you.. Whether it's the disease of divorce and or shattering of innocence and illusion or a medical diagnosis.. At some point we all end up in the "Breakdown Lane"
    • 5/5
      Great book. Compelling look at how MS changes your life. The family dynamics were realistic and the characters raw with with emotion.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      tuytyguhytttuyttuyyututuyytttuu
    • 5/5
      sooooperb
    • 3/5
      Julieanne seems to have it all....a loving husband whose job as a lawyer allows for them to live comfortably, three beautiful children, a part-tine job writing an advice column, a supportive best friend and great in-laws. So she is shocked when she comes to the realization that her husband, Leo has left their family to raise another on a commune with his new love, Joyous.At the beginning of the novel, I wasn't at all impressed with the storyline. I'm not sure if this is due to Mitchard's writing style or narrator on the cds that I listened to, but at some point I started to be invested enough in the characters, to continue listening. My favorite character, by far, was Gabe, Julieanne's oldest son who steps up to help Julieanne during the worse of the illness. While this is an admirable quality, I think I was more impressed with his sarcasm. I also liked the Grandpa and Grandma Steiner, who take a stand against what their son Leo has chosen to do and support Julieanne through the eventual divorce. What irritated me about the book, however, was the dreamy doctor that finds Julieanne and sweeps her off her feet, and the way the book continues even after the wedding(which seems like the logical resolution) to sort of make up for how 'happy ending' like it had become. Overall, I don't think I would recommend this novel to anyone, but it was an entertaining but forgettable read.
    • 5/5
      Writer did good job of developing characters--I felt genuine disdain for the husband; frustration for the wife and daughter, and sympathy for the son. Still couldn't believe the husband through his marriage away for a "utopian," communal living type lifestyle. What a loser!
    • 4/5
      I initially found this book difficult to get into. The alternating chapters written by the Mother with MS and her son were somewhat confusing, but clarified along the way. Gabe...the son has learning disabilities, but there is no clue to that in his journal which I found slightly off putting. The book did illustrate the impact that a disabling, degenerative illness has on the family structure and the old saying "when illness comes through the door, love flies out of the window" certainly applies here. I found the husband Leo's character very irritating and I am unsure if that was definitely what the author intended. I loved Jacquelin Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" and "Cage of Stars", but was slightly disappointed in this novel.
    • 3/5
      The Breakdown Lane is a story of a woman who has it all. The husband, the job, three children, a house and it all comes unglued. The husband turns out to be a weak-kneed ba**ard who "needs time to find himself" basically. But he is really trying to find a way out of his responsibilities without looking like the worm he is. The wife finds herself with a very serious illness and being unable to reach the husband two of the children secretly set out to find him and find him they do; (***spoiler alert***) with another family. Anyway the wife and children bravely learn to carry on, the mother having help with great friends. The father attempts to help in his own way. In the end all survive to carry on and live their lives and so shall we.The first two thirds of the book had me but throughout the last parts I was pretty much yawning my way to the finish line.I thought most of the characters could have been drawn much stronger and the only ones I came to care about were the children and the friend.Soooooooo, what's next on the list? Hmmmmmmmmmm?
    • 4/5
      I haven't read any Jacquelyn Mitchard books for quite a while, and now I'm not sure why. I don't like to do blow by blow reviews, but I enjoyed this book a lot. It basically involves a woman who writes an advice column part time. Her husband goes through a midlife crisis in which he decides he wants to get back to nature and live a communal life...a far cry from his life as a University lawyer. He eventually quits his job and takes a "sabbatical" from his family, which includes 2 teenagers and a 2 year old. He does this even though his wife obviously has a sporadic mysterious illness...which is finally diagnosed as multiple sclerosis after he leaves. He becomes completely incommunicado, but is eventally tracked down at a commune in NY State where he is living under another name with a young woman and their young child with another one on the way. The thing I like best about Mitchard is the way she writes character. She writes as two different characters in this book...of different generations, and pulls both of them off really well. I can see, hear and feel her characters, and they seem very "real" to me. I enjoy the way she writes about relationships as well, between family and between friends. She wraps things up in an almost fairy-tale way that was a bit of a stretch for me, but I still really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to friends. I have another of her books already downloaded to my eReader, and can't wait to read that one.
    • 4/5
      I'm a huge Jacquelyn Mitchard fan. This book was moving heartfelt and real. I read it awhile ago, and it's in my "re-read" pile.