Staring at beautiful tulips, David, an orthopedic surgeon with a terrible secret he has chosen to forget, explores "...this idea that the body was, in some mysterious way, a perfect mirror of the world." But what David fails to consider failure is that EVERY body may also be a perfect mirror that shows us more about ourselves than we would care to admit.

For David assisted his wife to give birth to twins, one whom the world would call "normal" and one with Down suffering. In shame and anguish arising from his own past, David gives the latter child to his nurse and tells her to take it to an institution and to never tell anyone what has occurred. But Caroline, his nurse, runs away with the child, Phoebe, and manages to have a difficult but happy life - that is until she runs into David years later and admits her love for him.

The plot is relatively simple but there are other secrets affecting the lives of these characters that carry the story along with some other mid-life crises and dramatic scenes that may or may not arrive in every life. Kim Edwards is brilliant in the way she subtly yet so powerfully depicts the domino effect of choices made at every stage of an adult's life. No, there's not a perfect ending but it's a very real one that will leave this story forever in your own memory with its simple poignancy and revelation about what it means to be a family.

A literary presentation of the finest quality!

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on January 12, 2007

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