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5.0 out of 5 stars
Filled With Rare Beauty, April 16 2004
Myra Lipinski is 51 and single. She's plain, introverted, and her one great passion is her job as a nurse. Although she's not exactly discontent, Myra has resigned herself the fact that the rest of her life will be fairly uneventful. Yet then her former high school crush comes back into her life-the handsome, impossibly accomplished Chip Reardon. But Chip is no longer the perfect specimen he was. He is dying from a brain tumor, and Myra becomes his nurse. Then, their relationship deepens and they are both forced to confront horrifying, enormous, and unbelievably profound ideas about dying, death, the meaning of life, and falling in love.Okay, you can stop rolling your eyes now! Admittedly, in the hands of a lesser author, "Never Change" would become a weepy, soap-operaish mess. Elizabeth Berg, on the other hand, has the intelligence, piericingly superb writing skills, and keen sense of character necessary to pull off such a tough subject. What really makes "Never Change" such an unforgettable and deeply enjoyable read is Myra. From the the first chapter in which Berg effortlessly and precisely captures Myra's remembrance of longing to go her high school prom, she makes her character shine. And it's not that Myra shines because she is unique or unusually intelligent or accomplished-she is a memorable character because she is NONE of those things. Instead, throughout "Never Change" Myra's longings, wishes, thoughts, and perspectives resonate because of the deep truth that lurks behind their normalcy. I also loved this novel because it never pretended to have all of the answers about dying. It showed the horribly grotesque and hideously frightening side of being terminally ill and brought up an endless of number of hard questions about the issue. Indeed, "Never Change" even ends with a somewhat nebulous stance on how a life should be lived after it has been touched by another's death. But this seeming wishy-washyness and lack of clear-cut opinions about death is genius. It is truly realistic, since who really know what death is like? Also, by allowing her characters (mainly Myra) to ponder aspects of death and dying without coming up with many answers, Berg takes her readers on a thoughtful "journey" and allows them to perhaps make up their own mind on the issues. Finally, I relished the secondary characters included in the book. Since Myra is a traveling nurse who visits patients in their home, she comes into contact with an eclectic spectrum of humanity. All of these many patients-from a wounded drug dealer to a lonely yet intelligent elderly woman in a retirement facility-add new angles of insight and enjoyment to the story and are cleverly created to influence Myra in unique and "fun to read" ways. Yes, it could have been a horrible book. And yes, the idea of Myra falling in love, over 35 years after last seeing him, with her dying high school crush sounds like a bit too much to swallow. But with her lovely characters, compassionate prose, and satisfyingly deft writing, Elizabeth Berg makes it so you wouldn't want to change a thing about this book.
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