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I was so intrigued by the title that I kept it on my to-read list for years, but when I finally settled down to read it, I didn't fall immediately in love. I felt the "voices" of the various sisters were too similar, and all of them seemed quite shallow.

However, it is not without its merits. The book moves backwards in time, and the younger the girls got, the more interested I became in their characters. I especially liked reading about their lives before they moved to the States. My favorite part was the description of their family as a shared community: "We lived in each other’s houses, staying for meals at whatever table we were closest to when dinner was put out, heading home only to take our baths and go to bed��"


Favorite Quotes:

(about childhood)
…the wonder of the world seizing me with such fury at times that I had to touch forbidden china cups or throttle a little cousin or pet a dog’s head so strenuously that he looked as if he were coming out of the birth canal��

The Catholic sisters at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Convent School were teaching me to sort the world like laundry into what was wrong and right��

…three black cars idling in the driveway like great, nervous, snorting horses.