This sprawling novel of two generations has an adoption at its center. In the early 1960s, Sol Matzner, and East Coast Jewish doctor, meets a young Italian beauty, Cici. They have a physically wonderful relationship, and she gets pregnant, but there are complications and she loses the baby. A young heavily pregnant drug addict in Trenton comes into a health clinic and gives birth to a girl. She then quickly steals away, leaving her child. Through a series of coincidences, Sol learns of this baby and arranges for its adoption to console his heart-broken wife. But the adoption does not cure the tensions in the marriage, and although the couple soon achieve financial success, their relationship is not an easy one for most of its remaining years. Their daughter Cheri does not get on well with either of them, and she has an unusual history of stellar academic achievement and a career with the NYPD. Cheri, the central character, is an academic specializing in ancient antiquities when we first meet her, and she is in a failing marriage with Michael, an independent film maker. Michael gets terminal cancer and goes off to make his final work. Cheri is left to ponder her life and plan her next steps.  The plot skips backwards and forwards in time, gradually revealing what happened in the troubled marriage of the mismatched Sol and Cici, Cheri’s experience as a child who discovers she is adopted only when she is most of the way through her childhood, and her passionate devotion to being a police officer which ended when she discovered the moral problems that go with the job. Then there’s the question of whether she can make a new life in her middle age.

Listening to the unabridged audiobook performed by Courtney Patterson is an engaging experience. She brings alive the eccentric and difficult character of Cheri’s mother Cici, and makes Cheri’s father Sol surprisingly sympathetic.  Cheri’s husband Michael is probably the least likeable character in the book, but we can see how Cheri would have been attracted to him. The book, set mostly in New York, New Jersey, Chicago and Italy, gives some local detail. Ultimately the book is a meditation on life’s rich pattern, and is celebratory, but there is an awful lot of pain and unhappiness along the way.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring is an avid hiker.