I can't think of a better way to tell the story of this family than the way Angela chose to do it...through vignettes, varying points of view and tenses, mixing and matching to come up with a crazy quilt of people, problems, and (yay!) no real solutions. Also, it made me cry.

This is more than a collection of vignettes on three generations of a Mormon family. It's a poignant, melancholy look at simply being a frail human being navigating the delicate balance of living with other frail human beings.

Excellent, excellent book.

ETA: This is a book clearly written by a short-story writer and assembled so as to make it a novel, but the vignette nature of it could bother some readers who want an "actual" novel. I'm curious to see if the author can write a full-length novel without relying on short-story writing techniques. ( )

I came to this book with high expectations and wasn't disappointed. The format (a collection of interwoven short stories) works well in terms of allowing for multiple points of view, which is appropriate for a book that is more about a family than it is about any individual member of that family. However, the format also means that individual plot lines can feel somewhat unresolved. In addition, a few of these stories have been published separately, and I felt that those stories didn't integrate as well with the rest of the book. ( )