Book Review: The Past That Made Us

Reviewed by Shelby Zwintscher

A heart-wrenching, tenderly hopeful story of the love, loss, and lessons that rise out of a cancer diagnosis

For years Millie has depended on herself and herself alone. Grinding away at work and keeping the world at an arm’s length has been the best way to get distance from the past that still haunts her.

As a senior manager at a large accounting firm, Millie doesn’t have time to waste making another visit to the emergency room, but her stomach pain is horribly persistent. She is anxious to receive a diagnosis, a prescription, and an okay to get back to the grind. But the grind comes to a screeching halt when Millie is diagnosed with cancer.

Millie can handle this on her own, she has to. That is—until she physically cannot. After missing an appointment due to chemo side effects, the hospital calls her estranged mother and Millie has no choice but to return to the town she grew up in: St. Bell, Maine.

For Millie, returning to St. Bell means facing a past she’s spent years trying to bury. St. Bell is where her broken family ran to in order to escape the grief of her sister’s death. It’s where her father’s abuse darkened her and her mother’s days. It’s where her mother became hardened and detached, no longer much of a mother at all. But it’s also where she experienced her first love and, with it, immense heartache.

“For so long, I lived with a brokenness inside of me. A shattered heart I tucked away into a darkened and sealed-off place. But Mother’s arrival and my return to St. Bell illuminated the painful memories I spent years ignoring.”

The Past That Made Us is a story of hope despite the odds: cancer, trauma, and stubbornness. The complexities of rekindling broken relationships and the newfound hope that flourishes out of hardship are all written with breathtaking detail and thoughtful prose. I was so wrapped up in this novel, it even made me cry. Twice!

The characters represent the wonderfully painful rollercoaster of being human. Throughout the story we witness Millie’s begrudging growth and the ripple effect of that growth on relationships she thought were long lost. Every character feels as though they have walked out of real life and onto the pages.

The Past That Made Us balances the plot, medical information, and character development with great care. The steady creeping in of hopeful undertones is what elevates this heartbreaker of a story most. We need hope, and we get it. We’re taken exactly where we need to be by story’s end.

“My diagnosis follows me like a skulking ghost everywhere I go. My physical scars are a beacon of my fight. But no one recognizes the internal scars cancer leaves in its wake. The ones hidden deep. The ones that hurt the most.”

You should pick up The Past That Made Us. It’s sad and it’s hopeful and it’s a ton of things in between. It’s going to stick with me for a long time.

Thank you for reading Shelby Zwintscher’s book review of The Past That Made Us by Kelly Marks! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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