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Review

September 20 - 27, 2006
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Gulf Weekly Review

For One More Day
Mitch Albom
Hyperion; 208pp

In this first novel from Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven author Albom, grief-stricken Charles “Chick” Benetto goes into an alcoholic tailspin when his always-attentive mother, Pauline, dies.
Framed as an “as told to” story, Chick quickly narrates her funeral; his drink-fuelled loss of savings, job (“sales”) and family; and his descent into loneliness and isolation.
After a suicide attempt, Chick encounters Pauline’s ghost. Together, the two revisit Pauline’s travails raising her children alone after his father abandons them: she braves the town’s disapproval of her divorce and works at a beauty parlour, taking an extra job to put money aside for the children’s education.
Pauline cringes at the heartache Chick inflicted as a demanding child, obnoxious teen and brusque, oblivious adult chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of a baseball career.
Through their story, Albom foregrounds family sanctity, maternal self-sacrifice and the destructive power of personal ambition and male self-involvement.
He wields pathos as if it were a Louisville Slugger — shoveling dirt into Pauline’s grave, Chick hears her spirit cry out, “Oh, Charley. How could you?” — but Albom often strikes a nerve on his way to the heart.







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