I just finished reading Mark Haddon's Red House about an extended family who gets together at a summer house after a family member's death, and I must say Joshua Henkin's novel offers a far more entertaining and insightful read on a similar vein, and it's also free of the annoying writerly tricks Haddon overused. This book just relies on good storytelling to show how a mother and three sisters and the wife are dealing with the loss of Leo, their son/brother/husband, who, like Daniel Pearl, became a celebrated journalist who was kidnapped and killed (although here it's in Iraq, not Pakistan). Henkin does a marvelous job at showing how each is dealing with their grief, complicated by the ongoing troubles in their lives. The mother is thinking about leaving her husband, the wife is afraid to tell her late husband's family that in the year since her husband died she met and fell in love with another man. The daughters have a whole set of their own problems. One is struggling to have a baby. Another, in perhaps the most intriguing storyline, moved to Israel and became an Orthodox Jewish after spending her teenage years as wild and promiscuous. Henkin has lots of balls to balance and he does the juggling act amazingly well, as he keeps the story lines intriguing around the centering event of them all gathering at the family's home in the Berkshires on the 4th of July for a memorial celebration on the 1-year anniversary of Leo's death. My only minor quibble with the story is that the points of view only shifts between the women - the mother, wife, and three sisters. I would have especially liked to have gone inside the head of the father especially, who feels his son's loss just as strongly as the others and is deeply hurt by his wife's desire to leave him because of the tension that stemmed from their different ways of grieving. Fortunately, his perspective gets conveyed through his interactions with his wife and daughters. It's a great novel with a great sense of place - offering detailed descriptions of the Berkshires as the setting for this family reunion.