Loved this book and all the characters in it, even those people who were so flawed and determined to be crappy. All seemed so well fleshed out and real. Loved the way the narration switched around from person to person to give all different viewpoints of the story and let you see inside their thoughts and feelings.

I kept wishing it not to end while at the same time reading in every spare second to see what was going to happen. I haven't been that involved in a story in a very long time and it was wonderful to be so immersed in this story. ( )

Excellent book. A lovely consideration of what it means to je good and why we might try to je good and the heartbreak that comes with unrequited goodness. Highly recommended. ( )

In a moment of distraction, spinster Clara Purdy crashes her car into one which contains a homeless family – in fact, the car was their home. When mother Lorraine is taken to hospital, she is diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Feeling somewhat responsible for their current predicament, Clara takes the rest of the family (three children, including a ten-month-old & their paternal grandmother.)

Clara is a good person—good to a fault, it seems. Clara invites the whole family to live with her while Lorraine has medical treatment. The husband/father takes off soon after with no notice, leaving Clara with granny & the kids. There are emotional entanglements and other consequences of Clara’s practical goodness.

From Amazon: “What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve?”

I find Marina Endicott’s novels to be consistently enjoyable. Thank you to Trish at Desktop Retreat who reminded that this remained unread. Recommended.

4½ stars ( )

Another from the Canadian pile, thanks to Miriam Unruh.

I loved this book about a woman who takes in a family after crashing into their car and the mother is dosicvered to have cancer. My only quibble is that we never had quite enough back story about Clara's parents or former marriage and the local priest was a little too good to be true. But I found the story heartbreakingly moving and the open-ended resolution just right. Why do we do the things we do? What motivates us to do right? Is there selfishness in acts of altruism and is that so wrong? And what are we owed for our goodness? This novel posits all the right questions. ( )

Good to a Fault is the ANZ LitLovers reading group choice for August, and it’s a wonderful book for discussion. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Giller Prize in Canada, and won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean.

Once, exasperated by a rather dreary visit to some nice friends of my mother’s, my father (sotto voce) said that very good people were usually boring. My father himself is a very good man so I was a bit shocked, but have since then sometimes thought that he might have been right. After all, there’s a whole media industry devoted to gossip: the cult of celebrity proves that most people would rather read about bad behaviour and scandal; it’s not easy to make the everyday niceness of people interesting reading.

Even harder is to make exceptional goodness interesting reading, but Endicott has achieved it. Her heroine, Clara Purdy, is a very good person. When she has a car accident with an itinerant family in crisis, she takes them into her home because the mother is diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Three children (one of them a baby); a light-fingered husband who had abused her after the accident; a poisonous old mother-in-law; and eventually also the children’s uncle. From a quiet and prudent life lived alone after the harrowing deaths of her parents. Clara suddenly finds herself with a full house, responsibility for the children, constant demands on her purse, and an obligation to visit the mother in hospital.

And she copes with all this with remarkable grace. It’s a convincing portrait, because the reader is privy to her moments of exasperation, doubt, anxiety about money and extreme tiredness, but her journey of self-discovery is notable for the way she so rarely shows her inner thoughts to anyone. She responds philosophically to remarkable provocation from the husband Clayton and Mrs Purdy the mother-in-law; she puts up with the chaos that children bring with amazing patience. She looks like a saint, but she cops criticism from the church ladies because they suspect her motives, and she has to act covertly because of the risk that social services will intervene. It’s a surprisingly diverting plot – and it raises such interesting questions…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/07/29/good-to-a-fault-by-marina-endicott/ ( )