A touching portrait of a family living under a cloud of sadness. Reta had a satisfying middle class life, with 3 well behaved daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying career as a translator and author. Then life crumbled when the oldest daughter, Norah, checked out of conventional life to sit at the street corner. Suddenly, her life changed completely emotionally, yet stayed very similar practically. Different characters adopted different ways to continue normally while making sense of Norah's situation. The father switched "hoby" and researched mental illness, the sisters appeared to just continued as normal teenagers, but went every Saturday to sit with their sister on the street corner, the grandmother stopped talking, friends offered various advices and suggestions to comfort. Reta escaped through her novel writing, but also tried to explain Norah's action as a reaction to the chauvinistic power struction of the world. I found some very keen and insightful description of living through sadness and grief. In the end, the story ties up neatly and hopefully, perhaps too neatly. But as Reta observed in her novel writing process, "tidy conclusions are a convention" but "it doesn't mean that all will be well for ever and ever, amen; it means that for five minutes a balance has been achieved at the margin of the novel's thin textual plane"