Description:

In eighteen years of marriage, Liz and Jack Sutherland had built a family, a successful law practice, and a happy home near San Francisco, on Hope Street. Then, in an instant, it all fell apart.

It began like any other Christmas morning. But for Jack Sutherland, a five-minute errand ends in tragedy. And suddenly, Liz is alone, in the wake of an unbearable loss.

How can she go on without her husband, her partner, her best friend? How can she grieve when she must console five devastated children, including one with special needs?

Powered by her children's love, Liz finds the strength to return to work, to become both mother and "daddy." One by one the holidays come and go, until a devastating accident sends her oldest son to the hospital—and brings Dr. Bill Webster into her life. Bill becomes a friend to Liz as he slowly heals her shattered son.

With the first anniversary of Jack's death approaching, and with it another Christmas in the house on Hope Street, a new relationship offers new hope, and Liz reflects on the little blessings that give strength when nothing else is left. But she will face one more crisis before she can look ahead to the beginning of a new life.

The House on Hope Street is about learning to live again after you think life is over. It is about cherishing small miracles, and believing in big ones. It is above all about hope.

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From Library Journal

A year in the life of newly widowed Liz, dealing with a special-needs child while warming to a new doctor friend.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A wife and mother puts the pieces back together after her husband is murdered.Liz and Jack Sutherland are successful divorce lawyers who live in Marin County, California, with their five children. On Christmas morning, the enraged husband of a client shoots Jack dead. In her typical singsong style, Steel (Granny Dan, 1999, etc.) takes Liz and her kids into the unthinkable horror of losing the person they love most in the world and then leads them pretty quickly out. Liz is helped through the following year by her best friend Victoria, her secretary Jean, and her housekeeper Carole. Nonetheless, in true soap-opera fashion, she shoulders most of the burden herself. Although she's grown to dislike dealing with people's nasty divorces, she stoically takes on a double caseload. She helps all her kids--especially her youngest child Jamie, a learning-delayed boy whose brain was damaged at birth--deal with the death of their father. When it comes time for the Special Olympics, an annual occasion for Jamie, Liz takes over Jack's job as trainer, coaching Jamie to his first winning medals ever. After an agonizing nine months of learning to sleep alone, Liz meets Dr. Bill Webster, the trauma doctor who helps her teenaged son Peter recover from a diving accident that left him with a head injury. Though Bill has always avoided long-term commitment, he can't help but be impressed by Liz's grit and her love for her family. Her daughter's resistance to him temporarily scares Bill off, but another Christmas finds him ready to take on carpooling with the manliest of them.This time out, Steel makes an intelligent choice of subject matter--and only occasionally threatens to treacle it to death. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.