Finished: Commonwealth (Patchett) This was a really good book! Their stories slowly unfold as we follow the lives of the six children who are irrevocably affected when the father of four of the children and the mother of two of the children have an affair and break up two young families when they decide to leave their first families and marry. At first I thought this was going to come off as rather soap-operaish, but instead it was a compelling story about how the step-brothers and sisters stuck together, in varying degrees, throughout their lives, even after their offending parents divorced years later. Much of the story centers on the tragic death of the oldest son of the four siblings. The actual cause of his death comes to light in small steps, but we do know that all the other children were there when it happened, and decided as a unit, never to tell their parents what exactly happened. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, but just the guilt and imaginations of children from 9 to 14 thinking they would somehow be held accountable for a death that was purely unavoidable. I felt like I knew each of the children personally by the end of the book, when they were grown, and most of them with children of their own. Franny, the baby girl of the two-child family, is a thoughtful, complex, eager to please young lady who ends up falling in love with the much older writer who she has idolized for years, and he for her. It's been years since he had a best-selling book and with Franny as his beloved and his muse, he writes his next best-seller, a book called Commonwealth. The only problem is...it's the story of Franny's life, and that of the two families, and the six children, and the tragic death of Cal, the oldest son/brother/step-brother. What comes to light is one of the things the children had promised never to mention...the fact that when the six of them used to be together during the summer, left unsupervised by their irresponsible parents (the two that had the affair), the older kids would feed Cal's benadryl tablets to 8 year old, annoying little brother, Albie, to make him fall asleep so the rest of them could run off and go to the lake or wherever they wanted, without his tag-along, non-stop talking, annoyance. Of course, Cal had those benadryl tablets for a reason...because he had a life-threatening allergy. And, so when it came time for Cal to actually need the pills, he had none in his pocket to use. Naturally, all the kids felt guilty for the rest of their lives for allowing Cal to use his pills on Albie just for their convenience. And Albie, who becomes a near-arsonist teenager, never realizes what the other kids used to do to him until he reads the new best-seller. Albie confronts Franny, and her writer boyfriend, Leo, and Franny immediately apologizes. She didn't realize while telling Leo her life story that their intensely difficult and personal childhoods would be displayed for all to see. Needless to say, Leo and Franny discontinue their relationship. All of the surviving children do end up in happy marriages with their own children, except for the oldest daughter of the four-sibling group, Holly, who has found peace in her life by living at a Buddhist Zen retreat in Switzerland! That is really just a fraction of a recap in what is another good, well-written Patchett book!