This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance

By: Jonathan Evison

Narrated by: Susan Boyce

With her husband Bernard two years in the grave, seventy-nine-year-old Harriet Chance sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise only to discover through a series of revelations that she's been living the past sixty years of her life under entirely false pretenses. There, amid the buffets and lounge singers, between the imagined appearance of her late husband and the very real arrival of her estranged daughter midway through the cruise, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life.

Jonathan Evison - bestselling author of West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and All About Lulu - has crafted a bighearted novel with a supremely endearing heroine at its center. Through Harriet, he paints a bittersweet portrait of a postmodern everywoman with great warmth, humanity, and humor. Part dysfunctional love story, part poignant exploration of the mother/daughter relationship, nothing is what it seems in this tale of acceptance, reexamination, forgiveness, and, ultimately, healing. It is sure to appeal to admirers of Evison's previous work, as well as fans of such writers as Meg Wolitzer, Junot Diaz, and Karen Joy.

©2015 Original Material © 2015 by Jonathan Evison (P)2015 (p) 2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Evison is a ridiculously gifted storyteller…[This is] an irresistible, inventive novel full of important ideas about how we live our lives as parents, children, partners, and human beings." (Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

"Has all the wonderful snap and sizzle we've come to expect from Jonathan Evison's work, and as much heart as any novel I've read in recent years. [He] packs an entire life - many lives - into this fine book, and does so with the empathy and insight of a writer at the top of his game." (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)

"Susan Boyce's voice for the elderly Harriet is spot-on; she provides the careful, precise diction of a person who has lived her life weighing her words to protect her secrets." ( AudioFile)

Almost perfect

Really enjoyed this book and narration. One little thing...the narrator pronounces Harriet's town incorrectly. Sequim is pronounced like Squim, not "Seaquim". I think it's important to say this correctly.
Otherwise, wonderful!

All in all remarkably good

The first quarter was mediocre. The long middle was wonderful, the ending was too abrupt

A surprising delight

Helen Chance is on an Alaskan cruise that her deceased husband bought (without her knowledge) two years ago. The physical journey is mirrored in the journey through her own life, which we see in flashbacks from the past (in no particular order). She has a chance to make peace with her "prickly" daughter (and, having been an honest, prickly daughter, myself, made me feel better about my relationship with my own mother), to see the truth about her son, her husband, her best friend. I enjoyed both journeys with her and couldn't stop listening to the book. It was *wonderful*. Well-written and an unexpected pleasure. Highly recommended.

Reader mispronunciation of local town names

Producer should have made sure the reader knew how to pronounce local town name...after 1 hour the repeated error in local town name proved too much for me. The author tries for unique sentence structures. Once or twice is okay but repeated throughout the first hour of the book made me give up.

Excellent!!!

A wonderful story that made me laugh out loud and cry tears as I reflected on my own life.

You can't go wrong with this read!!

Bobra T