The children grow up, Allison remarries, Sarah falls in love, gets married, faces the end of her own marriage. But this isn’t a book powered by plot. Instead, McColl’s gift is in distilling a lifetime — the relationships, hopes nurtured then dashed, joys still sought, even at life’s end — into vignettes of great beauty, ordinary moments held up for loving examination. Love and sex figure prominently. When her mother enjoys a flirtation with the laconic cowboy type who drove their moving van to a new life, she ponders her girlish response to the erotic: “My Barbie was having sex with Ken, but this was different,” McColl writes. “I was in on a secret I had wanted to know, and now I wanted to unknow it.” As an adult, she thinks, “if I, too, am quick to fall in love, and I am, it is because of her. See: guileless; also: open, unguarded. It occurs to me loving this way may not be smart for a grown woman.” [17]
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times