“I didn’t spend a year building a wooden flatboat and then sailing it two thousand miles down the Mississippi River simply because I was suffering from a Huck Finn complex, although that certainly played a part....I hungered to see that river country when I stumbled across an account of one of the first boatmen who braved the water route that America followed toward prosperity and greatness.”

“My mind replays her screams as the orderlies drag her from the ambulance, an otherworldly mix of falcon and banshee interspersed with strangled pleas: Nonono don’t touch me and I will kill myself and - most chillingly of all: They are coming! Do you hear me? They are coming!"

"Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on. We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs - moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on too. But it isn’t enough."

This is “a story about therapy: how we heal and where it leads us.” Gottlieb allows us to follow the progress of several of her patients, as well as her own, as we sit in on their therapy sessions. One of her patients is lonely, one is an alcoholic, one has anger issues and one is dying.

Twenty-four year old Catherine has just graduated from nursing school and is soon leaving to begin her job at John’s Hopkins Hospital. She’ll be living away from her mother, Sarah. She’s looking forward to being on her own for the first time in her life.

“The Wedding Night. The lights go out. Outside a storm is raging. It shrieks around them, it batters the tent. It feels personal, this storm. This isn’t the first time the electric has shorted. They’re beginning to feel afraid. This darkness feels somehow ominous, intent. Then from outside comes a new sound. You might almost mistake it for the wind. But it rises in pitch and volume until it is unmistakable.”

“Few know more about how movies are made than Tom Hanks - not just the technical details but the history drawn upon and the lives and relationships that must intertwine to create a motion picture. Hank’s ambitious novel is about the making of a multimillion-dollar superhero epic.”

If you’re a parent who has had similar work/family balancing issues, then you must read It. Goes. So. Fast. by NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.

If you’re interested in reading a novel about the turpentine process during a hard time in our country’s history, but with a just ending, then you must read "The Saints of Swallow Hill" by Donna Everhart.

If you’re looking for a novel that’s about four enterprising women figuring out life and solving a crime at the same time, then you must read "Someone Else’s Shoes" by Jojo Moyes.