“The Faulkes Chronicle will reward the reader with a portrait of an American family both ordinary and extraordinary, a portrait so sweeping it calls for landscape mode. I do not wish to lay an interpretive burden on this marvelously readable, touching novel, which has the elegance of simplicity without being simple in the least. However, the book resonates deeply on the theme of saying goodbye to one’s mother, whether that occurs through the literal death of a parent or the natural, inevitable maturing of the child into adulthood.”— Ward Raymond, The Pulse

“Death comes for everyone, of course, but when it comes for the mother of the improbably large Faulkes family, it takes on a transformative aspect that astonishes her children, mesmerizes strangers, and confounds her caregivers. As observed by one of the more than 30 children ascribed to the Faulkes clan, their mother’s capitulation to cancer is less a battle, more an internal pas de deux; she grows thinner and frailer, but in doing so she sheds the hefty plainness that the Faulkeses wear as a badge of pride and abandons the famous Faulkes stoicism for whimsy and guile. Their mother’s emerging beauty draws each child, from adult to infant, into her aura as they greedily monopolize and gratefully share their remaining moments together. A vividly striking yet subtly nuanced portrait of a family’s past and future emerges despite, or perhaps because of, a present mired in perplexing uncertainty and assured grief. Children pop up like toadstools, offering nothing more than a pithy observation or plaintive memory, yet in Huddle’s (Nothing Can Make Me Do This, 2011) dexterous hands a few words can convey volumes. The Faulkes clan is indomitable, and Huddle is a master at mining the depths of a discomfiting situation. A marvel.”— Carol Haggas, STARRED review, Booklist