The Phone Rang by Mary Reid Gaudio is the story of three sisters as they stand together to fight the battle against their sister Ann’s Leukemia. Autobiographical, historical and full of moral insight, The Phone Rang touches on multiple aspects of both the sisters’ lives and Leukemia as a destructive disease.

Gaudio shares the narrator’s seat with her sister Chee while also periodically slipping into Ann’s perspective. Ann often falls into telling the reader, or presumably Mary, about her journey through life up until the point of her diagnosis. Gaudio also intersperses her own backstory with the story of Ann and her disease. Chee on the other hand focuses specifically on Ann.

The structure of the novel can at times become distracting because of the large, unbroken paragraphs and the changes in font from italics to bold to standard. It seems that the same emotional impressions could be made with cleaner construction and more thorough copy editing. Though the novel’s structure fits Gaudio’s attempt at stream of consciousness narration, this mode of telling can also at times sidetrack the reader from the deeper emotional aspects. While character building and backstory are intensely important to establish in order for the reader to feel for Mary, Ann, and Chee, there are often points where the story falls into a mode of “telling,” and the reader can easily get lost in the vast amount of information being thrown at her.

All in all, Gaudio effectively taps into the emotional rollercoaster that ensues with such a life threatening diagnosis as leukemia, while also focusing on the humanity of her and her sisters. In the end, Ann reminds her sisters and the readers to live life fully, to act in the now, and to fight for survival.

The Phone Rang was published by Book Venture in 2015 and is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

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FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.