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Adam Haslett
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Making Toast: Summary and book reviews of Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, plus links to an excerpt from Making Toast and a biography of Roger Rosenblatt.
Making Toast A Family Story
by
Roger Rosenblatt
Hardcover: Mar 2010,
176 pages.
When his daughter Amy, a gifted doctor, mother, and wife collapsed and died from an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, left their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren. With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love. The day Amy died, Harris told Ginny and Roger, "It's impossible." Rosenblatt's story tells how a family makes the possible out of the impossible.
With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love.
A wonderfully written account of how one family handles a very painful event. I can think of no more heartwarming relationship than a grandparent and grandchild. Although this relationship is forged through painful conditions, the story is told in such an honest and factual, but warm and loving way that this is a book you will learn from and remember (C H). This is without a doubt the best book I have ever read on how to "get on with getting on". Making Toast will make you cry, but in doing so it might make you a better person. Read this book (Lois G)! Full Review (members only, 780 words).
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [A] beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void.
Kirkus Reviews
There is plenty of hugging and tears, but thankfully no mawkishness or emotional manipulation. Through the glass of the author's transparent style we see all the sharp and soft contours of grief
The Christian Science Monitor
The careful, deliberate writing... lays out every instance where Amy’s absence was noticed. Rosenblatt handles these moments delicately, often cloaking them in wit or anecdotes...
If there’s one shortcoming to Making Toast, it’s that Rosenblatt’s writing itself feels dispassionate. The anger that Rosenblatt mentions so frequently comes across as muffled and technical. Yet [he] commands your attention by other means... each isolated story makes your heart ache... a bleakly beautiful scatter plot of grief.
The Washington Post - Carolyn See
The story is about coping with grief, caring for children and creating an ad hoc family for as long as this particular configuration is required, but mostly it's a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing and how to be a class act.
E.L. Doctorow
A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.
Ann Beattie
Written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you're a part of this family.
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Making Toast
(members only, 780 words).
The Christian Science Monitor
E.L. Doctorow
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