In a beautiful dance of the adult relationships we are all familiar with—young lovers just starting out, best friends through the years, painful mistakes of the past, strained parent and child relationships that have followed both of you into adulthood, and grief from loved ones gone too soon—Alison Hammer gives us Little Pieces of Me where she blends all those parts together seamlessly.
Paige Meyer is in her early 40’s, engaged and in a healthy relationship with a loving and supportive man, and has two solid true friends at the core of her social circle. But Paige is currently unemployed, as she sees herself going through a bit of a transition in her life, and sadly is also still grieving the loss of her father, who unexpectedly passed away two years ago. Paige does not have the tight bond with her mother or twin sisters (who are thirteen years younger than Paige) so she feels a bit unmoored from her family.
Purely on a whim, Paige completes a DNA profiling submission (think: 23 and Me or Ancestry.com) for a start-up company that did not ultimately advertise with the company Paige no longer works for, anyway. But suddenly she receives a message that brings about shifts and changes in Paige’s world that no one could possibly have been expecting.
Alison Hammer finds clever ways of asking questions that could have brought about trope-y or stereotypical answers, but instead she brings us heartfelt answers, and sometimes even more questions, just as we would find if this was all playing out in one of our friends’ lives. This is a fictional tale, though Hammer gives credit for some parts of the journey to someone in the acknowledgements, but the entire story comes through with such genuineness and such clarity it is hard at times to remember that we are reading fiction. It feels much more like a friend opening their heart up to you in letting you in on some little-known aspect of her family’s past.
Hammer manages to use flashbacks and shifting points-of-view in such a way that you, the reader, are not hindered by only knowing what characters are willing to admit to each other. The reader gets to know exactly how some characters truly feel about each other – not just what their pride or ego allows them to say. Sometimes when situations present themselves where there really is no “correct” or “perfect” answer, it helps knowing what a character is really thinking, when they might otherwise be seen as someone being “wronged.” It also makes it incredibly difficult to not deeply connect with stories like this!
To my knowledge, this is Hammer’s second novel, but I am already looking forward to more from her. Her characters have unique and interesting aspects to them that make them memorable… and real. The fact that Paige’s family is Jewish is simply a part of who they are as people. She wasn’t ‘quirky’ because she was Jewish. She wasn’t ‘quirky’ because she was getting married for the first time in her 40s. These were all just small parts of what made the character of Paige. It is exactly the same way it happens in real life with real people, and I loved that about Alison Hammer’s writing immediately.
Little Pieces of Me is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of April 13th 2021.
Will you be picking up Little Pieces of Me? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Following her acclaimed debut novel, You and Me and Us, Alison Hammer offers a deeply moving story of family and identity. When a DNA test reveals a long-buried secret, a woman must look to the past to understand her mother and herself.
When Paige Meyer gets an email from a DNA testing website announcing that her father is a man she never met, she is convinced there must be a mistake. But as she digs deeper into her mother’s past and her own feelings of being the odd child out growing up, Paige begins to question everything she thought she knew. Could this be why Paige never felt like she fit in her family, and why her mother always seemed to keep her at an arm’s length? And what does it mean for Paige’s memories of her father, a man she idolized and whose death she is still grieving? Back in 1975, Betsy Kaplan, Paige’s mom, is a straightlaced sophomore at the University of Kansas. When her sweet but boring boyfriend disappoints her, Betsy decides she wants more out of life, and is tired of playing it safe. Enter Andy Abrams, the golden boy on campus with a potentially devastating secret. After their night together has unexpected consequences, Betsy is determined to bury the truth and rebuild a stable life for her unborn child, whatever the cost.
When Paige can’t get answers from her mother, she goes looking for the only other person who was there that night. The more she learns about what happened, the more she sees her unflappable, distant mother as a real person faced with an impossible choice. But will it be enough to mend their broken relationship?
Told in dual timelines, Little Pieces of Me examines identity and how the way we define ourselves changes (or not) through our life experiences.
