Just Finished Reading Elizabeth Berg's Tapestry of Fortunes

Elizabeth Berg is an established author of several novels...Tapestry of Fortunes is one of her latest, from 2013.  She tends to write stories about women and their relationships, not exactly the genre of literature I'm accustomed to reading.  But hey, I'm also stepping out of my habitual patterns by reading a historical romance novel right now, so why not try out this book, which incidentally cost me nary a penny since I checked it out from my local public library.  It turned out to be a different kind of fiction than I'm used to...

In order to fully grasp with a sense of sympathy, if not with a fully empathetic understanding (since I'm not a woman), it seemed necessary for me to read Tapestry of Fortunes with the mindset that women think and value things differently from men...especially in how they see their own lives more in terms of their relationships with others.  Now this might seem to be an overgeneralized assumption on my part, and I firmly believe that individual people should not be put into a box based on gender.  But this story's presentation is nevertheless all about how some women view life from their own perspectives...

The main protagonist, as well as the first-person narrator, is a middle-age woman named Cecelia who had lost her best friend Penny to ovarian cancer just a few months earlier.  Cece, as she is nicknamed, makes a living giving motivational speeches and writing self-help books.  She decides one day to step out and follow Penny's advice to make a difference in others' lives, first moving into a house with three other women, each with very distinct personalities and outlooks, and then doing volunteer work.  Cece has one man from her past, Dennis, with whom she wants to reestablish contact...and the other three women each come up with something that they want to rectify in their respective personal lives.  To this end the four go on a long road trip of self-discovery, from their home state of Minnesota eastward toward Ohio.  And I'm afraid I probably went a little too far in telling the story, although the details and outcomes of everything I've still left as a mystery to you, the potential reader of this tale...

It's tough as a reader if you undertake a novel like this and cannot hit it off with the main protagonist.  But I never could get into Cece's personality and came away with the impression that her value system was pretty shallow.  And it irritated me to no end that she was totally into the New Age movement, continually pulling out her deck of Tarot cards in order to direct her in what to do...and to give her friends similar advice.  O.K., I said it: call me close-minded, but although I love New Age music and like some limited aspects of that belief system...such as the value of quiet meditation, respect for the environment and diverse peoples, healthy eating, and the rejection of material accumulation for its own sake, I'm not at all into other more dubious features (at least as I see them) such as Tarot, crystals, channeling, psychic readings, or past lives...frankly, I thought the paranormal side to it had all peaked in popularity back in the 1990s.  So Cece's addiction to the Tarot got in the way of my enjoyment of this book...I wonder whether the author is herself a New Age aficionado and if this theme is in her other books...

All that aside, I'm glad I read Tapestry of Fortunes.  One big reason is that it portrayed characters who were passing through middle age, reexamining their own lives and whether they should change their priorities.  Now that is something I can latch onto...