Jewell's most recent novel (after Before I Met You) is a melodrama starring the Bird clan: happy-go-lucky mother Lorelai, patient father Colin, headstrong eldest child Meg, meek Beth, and dissimilar twins Rory and Rhys. "They lived in a honey-colored house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-perfect Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens." The narrative alternates between 2011 and flashbacks to the kids' childhoods, and the reader sees Lorelai's eccentricities (including her propensity for hoarding) gradually begin to weigh her family down. Easter is Lorelai's favorite holiday, replete with massive egg hunts and festivities, but when a catastrophe occurs, it forever alters the course of the Birds' lives. Each member of the family begins to drift away from the others, and the subsequent years find them dealing with affairs, abandonment, and death. Years later, following another loss, the family once again gathers and is forced to confront its troubled past. Jewell keeps the reader engrossed with her characters' winding, divergent paths. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lorelei Bird raised her four children and husband in a happy, picturesque home in the Cotswolds in England. So how is it that she ended her life starving, alone, and surrounded by junk? Jewell cleverly frames the destruction of the Bird family with Lorelei's last communications, e-mails with a man she met online. As Lorelei opens up about her messy life, her three surviving children narrate their struggles with adulthood. All of their reminiscences eventually come back to Lorelei's meticulously planned, stringently unchanging Easter Sundays, particularly the one where her youngest son, Rhys, a strange and lonely 16-year-old, hanged himself. He left no note, and as the story of this fractured family unfolds, the truth eventually comes out. Jewell deftly balances present-day funeral planning with revealing, increasingly explosive revelations from the past. Just when you think this family can't endure anymore, the father is moving onto a Spanish commune with the mother of his granddaughter. This is an absolute page-turner as all of the surviving Birds make their uncertain way back to the house they grew up in.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2010 Booklist

Through an email trail, Lorelei's adult children painstakingly unravel the progress of her dysfunctional illness with humor and love, while taking stock of its heartbreaking effects on the entire family. Verdict An insightful, dramatic look at the condition of hoarding. (LJ 5/15/14) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.