I imagine this book is semi-auto graphical account of growing up in rural Missouri in the early 1900's. It is beautifully written account of one family where nothing is as it seems. ( )

Maybe that was the way it went, that all your life you heard the singing and never got any closer. There were things you wanted all your life, and after a while and all of a sudden, you weren’t any closer than you ever were and there was no time left.

This is a novel about life, the messy, chaotic, craziness; the infinite variety; the joy and the sorrow. It is a novel about understanding how lives intertwine and yet how they remain separate; how we depend upon one another, and how we wish to spread our own wings and find our own way. It is about motherhood, fatherhood, sisterhood, and marriage, and the secret, internal lives, each of us lives, whether we intend to or not.

Beautifully written and deeply thoughtful, there are sections of this book that made me feel I was looking at my own reflection, even though none of the events that make up the plot had any semblance to my own life at all. There is a discussion of the nature of God that must surely be among the best treatments of the subject in print, for at its premise lies the essential question that guides belief and faith in the face of all the unfair and inexplicable tragedies every man is sure to know.

Perhaps the greatest struggle in our lives is to come to terms with who we are, as an individual, as a person unique from but in concert with others, a person with faults that we struggle not to have define us. Perhaps the only way to discover that person is to live long enough and to look backward, and perhaps all the looking back in the world will not truly tell us who we are in time. I found this book to be peopled with some of the most realistic characters in fiction--not a perfect saint or an absolute devil among them.

Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again - the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day and all the days that we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more? There could not be many; for we were a family growing old. And how would I learn to live without these people? I who needed them so little that I could stay away all year - what should I do without them?

My immediate reaction was that I would gladly read every word Jetta Carlton had ever written, then sadly discovered that would entail reading only one more book. I could wish for dozens, should they all be as brilliant as this.
( )

An interesting story of a family and the challenges of life that each deals with through the years. ( )

Sweet and funny and just a little bit Peyton Place. The final page is really beautiful. A gem.

I think I should have given it another star. ( )

Good writing, and I was hooked, but got bogged down in this book. I finally forced myself to finish it. Not for the modern reader, but good material for literary snobs. ( )