Stephanie Kallos's lovely and heartfelt first novel is a gift. A story of broken hearts and broken promises, it is also the story of the ways we put things back together-messily, beautifully, and ultimately triumphantly. Kallos is a writer to watch, and one who, mercifully, still believes in happy endings.

If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she foolishly believed it to be valued.

It's the greatest of Southern honors . . . to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given.

Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.

Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment.

Stephanie Kallos's lovely and heartfelt first novel is a gift. A story of broken hearts and broken promises, it is also the story of the ways we put things back together-messily, beautifully, and ultimately triumphantly. Kallos is a writer to watch, and one who, mercifully, still believes in happy endings.