A Year and A Day
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Reading Guide to A Year and a Day
William Morrow/Harper Perennial
Fifteen-year-old Alice dreams of her first kiss, has sleepovers, makes prank calls, auditions for “Our Town,” and tries to pass high school biology. It’s 1975, and at first look, her life would seem to be normal and unexceptional. But in the world that Leslie Pietrzyk paints, every moment she chronicles is revealed through the kaleidoscope of loss, stained by the fact that Alice’s mother, without warning, without apology, explanation, or note, deliberately parks her car onto the railroad tracks, into the path of an oncoming train.
In the emotional year that follows, Alice and her older brother find themselves in the care of their great aunt, forced to cope and move forward after their catastrophic loss. Lonely and confused, Alice absorbs herself in her mother Annette’s familiar rituals, trying to recapture their connection — only to be stunned by the sound of her mother’s voice speaking to her clear as day as she flips Sunday morning pancakes. Driven to understand who her mother was, Alice distances herself from her girlfriends and brother as she engages in “conversations” with Annette. As she works through her grief, Alice slowly begins to see Annette as an individual, separate from simply “my mother” — and ultimately embraces the bittersweet knowledge that the lives to which we are most intimately connected often remain the most mysterious of all.
Taking its title from the pop-psychology idea that it should only take a year to get over the death of a loved one, A Year and a Day is an intense and deeply affecting portrait of how the human heart counters tragedy and can spin hard won triumph out of the deepest despair. A redemptive, often humorous meditation on growing up and growing into oneself, this is an intimate and heart warming novel to curl up with and to savor.
Read a sample:
Praise:
“A Year and a Day encourages comparisons and invites us to relive or anticipate our own healing process at the death of a parent. We negotiate with young Alice the dangerous terrain of her grief, her misdirected anger, her yearning for normalcy, and with her, we grow up a bit.”
— Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Lisette’s List
“Pitch-perfect, heartfelt, and hilarious. In this superbly crafted novel, Leslie Pietrzyk offers a spellbinding portrait of midseventies life in the small town of Shelby, Iowa. Wry, witty, suffused with longing as well as hope, this is a wise and affecting story by an extremely talented writer.”
— Frederick Reiken, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey and Day for Night
“If I had to be fifteen again, I’d want to be Alice–hungry and angry, vulnerable and smart–as she struggles to understand the secrecy of the lives of those she loves.”
-Beth Lordan, author of But Come Ye Back
“Sweet, sad and achingly real, A Year and a Day is a richly textured rendering of a
young girl coming to terms with her mother’s death. In this exquisitely tender story,
Leslie Pietrzyk turns a deft hand to the mysterious rites of love, grief and the secrets that
bind us together and tear us apart.”-Judi Hendricks
“With impressive attention to detail, Pietrzyk successfully re-creates life in the seventies in a small Iowa town.”
— Washington Post
Me, in Iowa, roughly the same age as Alice.
RECIPE FOR A YEAR AND A DAY
Yes, people in Iowa DO eat a lot of Jell-O! In an old-time, small-town restaurant, the “salad bar” is likely to have as much—or more—Jell-O than lettuce. Here is one of my favorite versions. It adds color to a Thanksgiving table!
Eastern Iowa Pink Jell-O
- 1 8-oz can crushed pineapple in juice
- Cold water
- 2 cups boiling water
- 2 small (3 oz.) packages cherry Jell-O
- 1 ¾ cups Cool Whip (thawed)
- ½ cup frozen cherries, chopped
- ½ cup chopped walnuts
- 1 ½ cup mini-marshmallows
- Drain pineapple, reserving juice. Add cold water to juice to measure 1 cup.
- Stir boiling water into Jell-O in large bowl at least two minutes until completely dissolved. Add mixture of pineapple juice and water, stirring. Refrigerate 1 ¼ hours or until slightly thickened to the consistency of egg whites.
- Whisk in Cool Whip until smooth. Add cherries, walnuts, pineapple, and marshmallows. (Can be put in a mold sprayed with non-stick cooking spray at this point.) Refrigerate until firm (approximately 3 hours).