Never Change » (Abridged)

A former nurse with a caretaker's eye for the details of needing and being needed, Elizabeth Berg doesn't shy from the "women's writer" association. She writes with humor and sympathy about the small earthquakes upending women's lives and their extraordinary, human ways of setting things right again.

A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinsky has evdured the isolation of her middle life by doting on her dog, Frank, and immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse. Myra considers herself reasonably content, telling herself, It's enough, work and Frank. And it has been enough -- until Chip Reardon, the too-good-to-be-true golden boy she adored from afar, is assigned to be her new patent. Choosing to forgo invasive treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned from Manhattan to the New England home of his childhood to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poingnant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence, and longing.

Book Magazine

Fifty-one-year-old Myra Lipinski is fairly well adjusted for a loner. While she sees plenty of people as a visiting nurse and lives in the kind of town where everybody jumps in on others' conversations, she's nailed the essence of living solo: She cooks dinner for six and eats for a week, and she indulges in "an astounding array of bath products." Her eclectic collection of patients, including an argumentative married couple and a drug dealer, make up Myra's ragtag family. When her newest patient turns out to be none other than golden boy Chip Reardon, her high school crush, the novel takes its most banal turn: Stricken with brain cancer, Chip has come home to die, and Myra is his designated nurse. Though lucidly drawn, Berg's characters tend to fall flat, and the final outcome is annoyingly predictable. In this Oprah Book Club wannabe (Berg already has one under her belt with 2000's Open House), everyone learns a lesson, even, in the book's most ridiculous moment, a mugger cowed by the power of terminal illness.
—Daneet Steffens

(Excerpted Review)