HELLO FROM THE GILLESPIES (Monica McInerney)

Every year Angela Gillespie sends out a Christmas letter from Erigal, her family's sheep station in Australia.  For more than 30 years Angela has detailed the ups and downs of her family, which includes husband Nick, twin daughters Genevieve and Victoria (age 32), daughter Lindy (in her 20's), and 10-year-old son Ignatius (know as Ig).  This year has been difficult.  Lindy is back home after having launched a new and, so far, unsuccessful business, Genevieve, in California, and Victoria, in Sidney, are both on the verge of career ruin after being involved in separate scandals, an Ig has an imaginary friend named Robbie.  Nick has kept the station's financial problems to himself, trying to protect Angela from the hard truth about the future of their property, and has shut himself off emotionally from her, leaving her lonely and wondering about the future of her once happy marriage. 

Frustrated, Angela decides this year to write what she REALLY thinks in her Christmas letter.  The result is a scathing and brutally honest expose of all that she is feeling, of the mistakes and poor decisions of her daughters, her worries about Ig (whom she describes as "weird,") and Nick's coldness and distance from her.  She includes a fantasy (in which she has begun to indulge frequently of late) of what her life could have been if she had married Will, the architecture student that she was dating back in England when she met Nick. The catharsis of putting all of her thoughts and feelings on paper helps Angela to vent and to put her problems into perspective, but she realizes that she can never send this letter out as she traditionally does on December 1.  When a family crisis necessitates her leaving Erigal for a few days, all Hell breaks loose after her angry Christmas letter is accidentally sent out by email to 100 people.

Angela is a woman that will be familiar to many of us: taken for granted by her family, overworked, and in a rut.  She suffers from headaches, and when she travels to Adelaide for some medical tests a surprising turn of events results in her family seeing her in whole new light.  I won't say any more because I don't want to ruin the book for you.  I will say that Hello from the Gillespies is more than 600 pages of pure pleasure.  I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone!