Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

 I have really scratched my head over Mary Beth Keane’s book, Ask Again, Yes and how to best summarize it.  It is really a difficult book to pin down in a short paragraph.  I finally decided to just put it out there and let the chips fall where they may. The novel is a well written, compelling character study.  You will learn much from this novel about love and hate, mental illness and addiction, jealously and control, abuse and obsession and families with dysfunction.  That seems very bleak I realize and much of the story is heartrending at best, but the strong central theme found throughout is that there is love in spite of all the pain.  The father figure after his own near death experience, after seeing his daughter struggle with a husband’s alcoholism and after watching most of his friends suffer through tragic life experiences agrees with his wife when she says, “I think we’ve been luckier than most.”  Our lives are not promised to have only good times, our lives are not promised to be stress free and our lives are not under our control most of the time.  But, we can look back like Keane and say “we have been lucky.”