Jane Hamilton's novel has all the ingredients for a great book, but somehow fails to make the grade. The premise sounds unbelievable, yet she creates a realistic family that happens to include the brain damaged first wife as adopted daughter. Unfortunately, the fractured timeline left us wondering just where we were in the life of our narrator and the rest of the family. We assume the device was used to contast Vietnam/Iraq and the 50s-60s family dynamic with today's family. It only succeeded in breaking narrative into a jumble. Perhaps it would have been better to trust the reader to make those connections without forcing the timeline to lay them side by side.