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When her best friend and medical partner, Mara O'Neill, kills herself, small-town pediatrician Paige Pfeiffer takes in Mara's newly adopted daughter and discovers the unexpected pleasures of motherhood.

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9 reviews
Suddenly by Barbara Delinsky
This book is about a medical practice with 4 doctors in Tucker, VT. They each have and share patients.
One is preparing to adopt a baby but one days others learn of her death-sitting in her car in the closed garage. Others try to put the pieces together to solve her death.
The baby arrives and Paige steps in but she doesn't want a child. Paige has a sexual mate that teaches at the girls academy. There are so many twists and turns to this book, it's fascinating reading about them all.
The other people also have chapters of their own and the troubles they experience with the death, how it not only effects their medical practice but their personal lives.
Didn't see this ending happening, wow!
I received this book show more from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device). show less
This was a good family drama book. It was set in a small town and was about the lives of of the doctors in a pediatric practice. A friend and partner,Mara commits suicide and sets off a chain of avents. The plot was good and kept my interest.
½
About a doctor who commits suicide and sets off a series of crisis events in her small town partners. Well written with a building plot.
Suddenly, something happened to your best friend and work partner. How could you be so close to a person and not know them? Suddenly you are a mother; your life is changing right before your eyes.
Deb F. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.
nice past - time book.i enjoyed reading it .it has got all a complete package!!!
In the idyllic little town of Tucker, Vermont, life flows at a slower pace for everyone. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the lives of thirty-nine-year-old pediatrician Paige Pfeiffer and her colleagues. However when Mara O'Neill, Paige's medical partner and best friend since college, inexplicably takes her own life, the consequences of that one irrevocable act shatters Paige's peaceful life, and throws the lives of the three other doctors who practiced with her into absolute chaos.

For Angie Bigelow, grieving Mara's death becomes the final straw in the disintegration of her once well-organized - and ostensibly happy - home and marriage. Peter Grace, whose relationship with Mara was much more complicated than he admits publicly, is show more left with a sense of desolation at her death. He has difficulty coping with his feelings of grief and feels a growing discontentment with life; a feeling which has its roots in his youth.

Paige deals with her own feelings of loss and deep sadness by temporarily caring for Mara's newly-adopted baby daughter. As she slowly comes to terms with her grief, Paige clings to the hope that, in due time, she'll understand why Mara chose to end her life. And that her orderly life will eventually return.

What Paige hadn't counted on were the unexpected pleasures that often come with change. In the wake of such a tragedy, Paige never realized that she would ultimately discover true meaning and purpose in her own life; including the touch of a man who offers Paige things she never thought she wanted. But before she can allow herself to fully embrace a future she never imagined, Paige must let go of the past and learn to trust her new found happiness.

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading this book. It was a relatively quick read for me, and was very well-written. The story featured a wide variety of well-developed characters, and was written with a true understanding of the complexities of human nature and the intricacies of relationships.

This wasn't necessarily my favorite book by Barbara Delinsky, but it certainly was well worth reading anyway. I give Suddenly an A!
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½

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193+ Works 22,707 Members
Barbara Delinsky was born on August 9, 1945 in suburban Boston. She received a B.A. in psychology from Tufts University and an M.A. in sociology from Boston College. After graduate school, she worked as a researcher with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. After her first child was born, she worked as a show more photographer and reporter for the Belmont Herald. She has written more than 60 novels including Shades of Grace, Coast Road, While My Sister Sleeps and Not My Daughter. Some of her novels have been made into television movies including Three Wishes starring Valerie Bertinelli and A Woman's Place starring Lorraine Bracco. She wrote the nonfiction book Uplift: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors. She has also written under the pen names Bonnie Drake and Billie Douglass. Barbara's novels, Blueprints and Sweet Salt Air, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Some Editions

Monda, Carol (Narrator)

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Suddenly
Original title
Suddenly
Original publication date
1994-02
People/Characters
Paige Pfeiffer; Noah Perrine
Important places
Tucker, Vermont, USA
First words
Paige Pfeiffer ran at the front of the pack, setting a pace that a less bold thrity-nine-year-old might not dare, but she had a point to prove and a bet to win.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Dear friend and healer. Once loved. Never forgotten.
Blurbers
Goudge, Eileen; Mortman, Doris; Brown, Sandra

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, Romance, General Fiction
DDC/MDS
813.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English1900-19991945-1999
LCC
PS3554 .E4427 .S8Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
BISAC

Statistics

Members
418
Popularity
73,716
Reviews
8
Rating
½ (3.35)
Languages
5 — Czech, English, German, Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish
Media
Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
ISBNs
29
ASINs
6