I'm glad I read this book. It was a good commentary on life - especially in a large family. I could picture all the chaos in my mind and it was pretty accurate.
It is an interesting book to read, but the plot is very slow. Unlike some other books it doesn't beg you to finish just to figure out what happens.

Although I felt the plot was slow moving and a bit too detailed, the writing style became apparent in making the point of how life is full of the mundane. We wake up and realize where we are and wonder if we have become the person we thought we had set out to be. Life just seems to happen to Beck, as it does to most of us. It is what we do with the mundane and our attitude about our day to day interactions that truly end up mattering - or at least that's the message I got from reading the book. There are many points touched on throughout the book to create good group discussion and reflection on our own lives. Are we true to ourselves and those around us about who we are and do we reflect ourselves in that way? The place where we do try to recapture the grownup we started out being and then the reality of what we have actually become can be quite different. Even if we were not fortunate to grow up in a close knit large family like the Davitch clan, we create our own "families" around us that we interact with on a daily basis. Do we appreciate the people around us each day? Do we see them for who they are and as they truly are and appreciate our differences? I think Anne Tyler shows us, through Beck's eyes - in the end, how to reach that point and causes us to reflect on both how we look at the important people in our lives and how we show up in life. I was glad I took the time to force myself through the beginning chapters which seemed so full of meaningless details to reach the rich lessons learned by the end of the book!

It was okay. I was frustrated at the main character for the entire book. If you want change in your life, just start the process already. It was hard to feel sympathy.