What fun! My sister just posted a comment to my blog and she mentions that she is just starting Jane Hamilton's When Madeline was Young.
I am just finishing this absolutely terrific novel! It has so much more depth than the jacket description reveals. Writing in a flashback format, Hamilton parallels the lives of the wonderfully complex Maciver family members with the major historical events of the last five decades. Their dinner table is a hot bed of conversation where no subject is sacred, be it race, religion or war.
I told a dear friend yesterday that Julia Maciver was my mother. Now this is a family full of human foibles yet I felt that I knew and cared for each one of them with all their strengths and weaknesses.