When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine - Rilegato

"Monica Wood has written a gorgeous, gripping memoir. I don't know that I've ever pulled so hard for a family. When We Were the Kennedys captures a shimmering mill-town world on the edge of oblivion, in a voice that brims with hope, feeling, and wonder. The book humbles and soars.”—Mike Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert

Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers' wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work one April morning, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by enlisting the help of Mum's brother, Father Bob, a charismatic Catholic priest. And then, come November—her brother still overwhelmed by grief, her country shocked by the president's death, and her town bracing for a labor strike—Mum announces an unprecedented family road trip. Inspired by the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy, herself a new widow with young children, Mum and her girls head to "our nation's capital" to do some rescuing of their own. An indelible story of how family and nation, each shocked by the unimaginable, exchange one identity for another.