Release Date: November 9, 2024, 2nd Edition
Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-182-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57869-183-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024922354
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

SYNOPSIS

ALICE HAMMOND is a troubled soul. She dropped out of medical school when one of her professors made it too stressful for her to stay. Now she works as a home health and hospice aide in Providence, Vermont. She is a wonderful aide, the quality of her work is high, and her patients love her. But Alice tends to become too involved. 

The boundaries between providing compassionate care and getting too involved are already blurred when one of her patients dies and leaves her all his property and $125,000, while his brother, who had cared for him for nearly five years, receives nothing. Alice now has a chance at a new life but must first contend with her patient’s furious brother, and heal her own wounds from her past trauma in medical school. Will she be able to move forward with this stroke of luck?

PRAISE

“To Alice is a compelling, compassionate, humorous and oh-so-human story of the amazing caregivers that work in our towns everyday. The author’s detailed knowledge and respect of those in need of care and those doing the care through home health services creates a cast of characters true to life. Most of us will end up in these professional hands and we can be grateful for this eloquent and complex story of the burdens and blessings of caring so well.”

—Virginia Lynn Fry, author of Part of Me Died Too: Stories of Creative Survival among Bereaved Children and Teenagers

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“Barre author J. Peter Cobb vividly captures the details of hospice workers moving through rural landscapes and balancing a life of caring for others while trying to escape their own demons. In Alice’s case, those include a traumatic experience in med school and the expectations of a family who doesn’t understand her struggles. It’s no surprise how accurately Cobb portrays that world, considering his former role as the executive director of Vermont's Visiting Nurses Association. In To Alice, he shows the perils of putting your heart into something that just might not return the favor.”

—Seven Days

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“There is beauty amid the grittiness in Cobb’s novel. And readers care about Alice and the Vermonters she serves, and her reluctance to establish boundaries between them. The tagline asks, ‘Is caring too much a bad thing?’ There is no clear-cut answer; a mark of a realistic novel.”

—Montpelier Bridge

MEET THE AUTHOR

J. Peter Cobb is the author of two novels, "To Alice," about boundary issues faced by hospice and home care workers and "Some Things Aren’t Meant to Be," the story of John Gauthier, a man at the center of two love triangles who seeks a purpose-driven life and becomes a Roman Catholic priest. Prior to his retirement, Cobb was the director of the VNAs of Vermont for thirty-three years. He lives in Barre with his wife Cindy. Visit his website, www.jpetercobb.com.