Review: Rules for Visiting

Rules for Visiting

Jessica Francis Kane

May Attaway is a forty-year-old woman with a job as a landscape gardener on a university campus. She lives at home where she looks after her aging father. When the university acknowledges her work over the years by giving her a mini-sabbatical she decides to visit several of her friends. Friends she hasn't seen in a while. And while she attempts to navigate the modern world as a guest in other people's homes May is also trying to find meaning in her own life as well as identify who she is and how she appears to those around her.

Initially, I wasn't sure about this book, which seemed more than a little melancholy to me, but as I kept going, I saw that it was filled with little pearls of wisdom and I realized that May wasn't as depressed as I had thought. She was more a sensitive soul with a love of plants, trees and animals trying to find her way in a world full of people, people she didn't quite connect with as quickly as others around her appear to do. The more I read, the more I felt a connection with May, or found that it was easier to relate to what she was feeling, a sense of being unconnected in a world of change. In the end, I was pleased to see that the visits to her friends led to a transformation in May's ability to open up a little more and find what she's been missing.

Thanks to Penguin Random House for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.