Five Days Left

July 28, 2014
This starkly intimate epistolary novel that follows the diaries of two parents—one a dying mother, the other a foster dad—dissects the experiences of losing hope and finding strength. Mara, declining precipitously from Huntington’s disease, makes final preparations for adored adopted daughter Lakshmi, loving husband Tom, doting parents, and best friends Steph and Gina—all with the help of a lost-soul cabbie looking for redemption. Meanwhile, Scott has been an adoptive father for his inner-city foster son, Curtis, but Curtis’s biological mother will be released from prison in five days. Scott and his wife, Laurie, are preparing for the upcoming birth of a daughter but his life is thrown into chaos when a tragic turn of events forces him to choose between Curtis and the imagined peace of life without him. Timmell makes a powerful debut with these tautly drawn parallel dramas: Mara decides to cut short a decline she believes will destroy her family, and Scott risks his marriage to give Curtis a future.

In this gut-wrenching story, narrators Rebecca Lowman and Kirby Heyborne deliver all the necessary emotion without slipping into melodrama. Two parallel stories feature Mara, who has end-stage Huntington's disease, and Scott, who is about to lose custody of his beloved foster child. As the plot brings the climax of these tragic situations ever nearer, Lowman and Heyborne fully differentiate all the characters. Wisely avoid sentimentality, they employ restraint and understatement while subtly building intensity. These portraits of emotional devastation offer valuable, if uncomfortable, insights. Listeners will find stepping away difficult. M.O.B.