From Elizabeth Berg: "Joyce Maynard has outdone herself in this beautifully written story you’ll find hard to put down and impossible to forget.”

Goodreads is making me feel like everyone has read this but me! (It's my loss: the ratings are terrific.) From Jodi Picoult: "Joyce Maynard is in top-notch form with Labor Day. Simply a novel you cannot miss."

Ginger says: Eleanor falls in love with a farm as a young single woman, in part because of Old Ashworthy, the big old gorgeous tree on the property. As she marries and her family grows, that tree plays a part, watching over them all until a series of culminating events made me call my best friend and beg her to tell me how it ended, lest I not be able to bear how it finished. She wouldn’t tell me the specifics, but she assured me that it has a satisfying ending, and she was right—tree included. This was my first Joyce Maynard, but it certainly won’t be my last. How the Light Gets In, out just last summer, continues the story of Eleanor’s family.

From the publisher: "It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn—a perfect September day. Thirteen-year-old Wendy is heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her stepfather. She's out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center—her mother's office building. Through Wendy's eyes, readers follow her slow and terrible realization that her mother has died, and the family's struggle to move forward with their lives. Wendy's journey takes her to California, where she forges friendships with her father's cactus-growing girlfriend, a teenage mom, and a sad bookstore owner with an autistic son. Along the way, she begins to understand the deep love and connection she has with her brother."