The House on Beartown Road cover art

The House on Beartown Road

A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting

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The House on Beartown Road

By: Elizabeth Cohen
Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
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About this listen

 Elizabeth, a member of the "sandwich generation", people caught in the middle of simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents, is the mother of Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and responsible for both. Hers is the story of a woman's struggle to keep her family whole, to raise her child in a house of laughter and love, and to keep her father from hiding the house keys in his slippers.

In this story full of everyday triumphs, first steps, and elderly confusion, Ava, a baby, finds each new picture, each new word, each new song something to learn greedily, joyfully. Daddy is a man in his twilight years for whom time moves slowly and lessons are not learned but quietly, frustratingly forgotten. Elizabeth, a suddenly single mother with a career and a mortgage and a hamper of laundry, finds her world spiraling out of control yet full of beauty. Faced with mounting disasters, she chooses to confront life head on.

©2003 Elizabeth Cohen (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks Women

Critic Reviews

  • Audie Award Finalist, Biography/Memoir, 2005

"Moving yet unsentimental....With splashes of humor and occasional, and understandable, self-pity, Cohen's fluid prose lifts her forceful story to a higher level, making it a tribute to her father and her family." (Publishers Weekly)
"Cohen...captures the irrepressibility of a young child and the poignancy of a man nearing the end of his life in an incredibly touching story that examines aging and family responsibility." (Booklist)
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