Here’s what this book does: it transports the reader. I read this book, which is not small, in record time. It is a book I sat up late with and picked up before work in the morning. I spent the better part of last weekend on the couch with this book, but although I was on a couch in Queens, I felt like I was in a vacation house in the Berkshires over the 4th of July, getting ready for a memorial service for my journalist brother/husband/son who’d been killed in Iraq. I was immersed. Josh’s writing disappears so that the experience is seamless–you open his book and you suddenly aren’t you anymore. You’re in his world. Tricky word play would pull the reader right out and despite the sadness pervasive in this book, I’ll bet that when you read it you’d rather be in than out.

The dead journalist, Leo, came from an UWS family, his parents’ last child, born after three older sisters. The reader gets to know each of these sisters, as well as the parents and Leo’s widow, Thisbe. The characters I felt commanded the bulk of the attention in the novel were Thisbe and the youngest of the sisters, Noelle. She was the character who most fascinated me: a former wild-child who struggled in school, partly because of a late-diagnosed special need, and whose promiscuous behavior necessitated the family’s relocation to the suburbs for the kids’ teenagerhood. In a development that surprised everyone, herself included, Noelle moved to Israel in her twenties, became an Orthodox Jew, married and had four small boys. Getting to know Noelle was a privilege–what a strange, complicated girl. Seen through her eyes, as well as the eyes of her sisters and her sister-in-law, the picture was both complicated and clarified.

That is one of the delicious aspects of this book–the reader alone is privy to both what is in each of the characters’ heads and hearts as well as what they think of, and say about, each other. The reader becomes the one trusted confident in a tense household of people who love each other and yet withhold their full selv