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Rating: 2.5

Eight months after the death of their mother who is spoken of in hagiographic terms, three siblings in their early forties, their spouses and young children gather at the upstate New York home of the middle son, Henry, and his wife, Alice. It’s Christmas, the first without their beloved Helen, who brought the group together and invariably smoothed out tensions. And tensions there are aplenty—internal, marital, and familial.

The youngest of the siblings, Kate, the one with the deepest attachment to Helen wants to move with her husband and three kids from Virginia to Florida into the home she and her brothers grew up in. Helen left no will, so for the time being the house is being rented. The siblings are to decide what to do about the place at this holiday gathering. A few years back, Kate and her husband could easily have bought out her siblings. Josh had a huge inheritance. Unfortunately, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer; he made some lousy investments in tech stocks and lost almost everything. Kate’s brothers and their wives don’t know about her family’s financial vicissitudes yet, but a couple of them have anticipated her request. Kate hopes she might somehow convince them all to give her the house. The main obstacle is Tess, her prickly sister-in-law, a workaholic New York City litigation lawyer.

Steger Strong skillfully takes the reader into minds of the six adults in this family, providing insights into their values, worries, and insecurities. The women’s concerns get far more airplay than the men’s. Another strand of the plot concerns a 23-year-old single mother, Quinn, and her six or seven-year-old child, the precocious Maddie. Quinn, a former heroin addict, had her child taken from her for a time by Child Welfare Services. Quinn was sent to rehab and then lived in a halfway house until she got her act together. Alice is the social worker assigned to Quinn and Maddie’s case. It’s a particularly tough one for her. Alice desperately wanted a child of her own, underwent extended fertility treatment, and had numerous miscarriages nevertheless.

The plot of the novel takes a fairly dramatic turn when Maddie goes missing during this holiday period. I’ll not say much about this, except to note that this is where I think the novel falters. Many pages are dedicated to Quinn, Alice, and Alice’s brothers-in-law traipsing through the woods, fearing that the child may have died of exposure. Meanwhile back at the house, Kate and Tess work on dinner, supervise the children, and draw closer over several glasses of wine.

I can tolerate play-by-play present-tense narration of characters� inner states—and I think Steger Strong does this beautifully in the first two thirds of the novel. But I draw the line when this technique is applied to document actions—the minute by minute progression of children’s activities, their squabbles, and the minutiae of meal-time behaviour, for example. There’s far too much of it in the last third.

I also found the conclusion of the novel cloying. What had been a convincing depiction of characters� internal and external conflicts devolved into the kind of domestic fiction I don’t enjoy: women preparing meals and intervening when their little “duckies� quarrel or become impatient. Some may find the novel’s finale heartwarming, and, to be clear, I am not averse to reading about people who experience a sense of unity with others or at least look past their differences, but the final scenes here were overdone. In particular, the last bit where everyone lies down to look at an art installation (recreating a previous experience orchestrated by the saintly Helen) just felt contrived.

I’m unlikely to look for the author’s other novels.