Description:

From Publishers Weekly

In Napolitano's wonderful first novel, deftly told from six points of view, a New Jersey family bears witness to the cycle of life. The matriarch of the Irish-American McLaughlin clan, Catharine, is living in a care facility, her "whole life [in] one room." On the other end of the spectrum, Catharine's unmarried granddaughter, Gracie, is pregnant by a man she doesn't love. The news is a surprise: Gracie wishes she'd conceived immaculately; her sister, Lila, can't believe Gracie's pregnant again; and Catharine has hangups about illegitimacy. Napolitano gracefully and honestly charts the tensions as the various family members come together. "We are family, but we have very little in common except that we are terrible at small talk," muses Lila at an Easter gathering. "[W]e size each other up and glance for the nearest exit and wonder, Why are you here? Why am I here?" Gracie's unborn child promises both conflict and hope. As Catharine, haunted by loving ghosts of the past, recalls, "There was order to our family then, and small children running around filling the rooms with laughter.... [W]hen the baby comes, when the laughter of children fill our rooms again, everything will settle down. This family will be whole." Catharine's hopes becomes the readers' hopes as well, as they watch her family—her "life's work"—grow and endure.
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From

In this graceful and fluidly written debut, Napolitano breathes new life into that workhorse of women's fiction, the family saga told from multiple points of view. An Irish-American family in New Jersey, tied together and split apart by the usual family fare, twists and turns on an unexpected pregnancy. Gracie, the 29-year-old advice columnist for the Bergen Record, is addicted to the flush of first contact and pregnant by the guy she's just broken up with. Her sister, Lila, a third-year medical student, is brittle like their mother, Kelly, and sharp like their grandmother Catherine. Aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, all have their say as the chapters pass from voice to voice, recounting marriages broken, lost, and blooming. The past isn't past, of course, it never is in families, but Napolitano's clear-eyed narrative allows us to see the ghosts and desires along with the current ties that bind. GraceAnne DeCandido
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