In these seamlessly interwoven stories Linda Svendsen charts with tenderness and devastating accuracy the longings, pleasures, and terrors of belonging to a family. Through the watchful and sometimes astonished eyes of Adele Nordstrom, we see her chaotic working-class home in Vancouver: her mother, June, a cocktail pianist who never stops believing in the redemptive power of another marriage, and who soothes a frightened daughter by playing and "Away in a Manger and " on her back; and her brother Ray, the roving charmer. And there's Adele herself, who as a child will look unsparingly at the failures of her elders, and as a grownup will find herself helplessly repeating them