Grand Avenue,

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Grand Avenue chronicles the lives of four women of who live on the same
street in Cincinnati. After meeting at a park where their young children
are playing, they decide to form a club and commemorate its inception
with a videotape of their youthful, happy selves. By the end of the
novel, they are older and disillusioned, each having suffered terrible
tragedies.

The characters are a study in contrasts. There’s Vicki, a cut-throat
lawyer who lives for her work; Susan, a satisfied wife who ends up
jeopardizing her relationship with her doctor husband; Barbara, a former
beauty queen who is betrayed when her husband, a university professor,
inevitably leaves her for a student; and Chris, who suffers mental and
physical abuse at the hands of her psychopathic husband.

At the end of this powerful novel, one of the characters says, “[T]oo
much time is wasted on regret. We can do nothing with the past but
acknowledge and accept it.”