It took all of about thir­ty sec­onds for me to be drawn into this beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten fam­i­ly saga set in the 1960’s in the Bronx. Jan­ice Eidus gives us a young pro­tag­o­nist who is an aspir­ing poet but the author is some­thing of a poet, her­self, in her con­struc­tion of a world you can feel, hear, taste, and touch. These mul­ti-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters might have been your class­mates or neigh­bors or cousins or friends; that’s how tan­gi­ble and real they seem. Their com­pli­cat­ed and fas­ci­nat­ing inner and out­er lives are aching­ly human and thor­ough­ly acces­si­ble. Eidus push­es every empa­thy but­ton in a writer’s reper­toire. Who doesn’t remem­ber being a child and grap­pling with exis­ten­tial issues far too com­plex to under­stand at that lev­el of matu­ri­ty? Eidus taps right into this very young, though sophis­ti­cat­ed, thought process and the child’s valiant attempt at under­stand­ing the world is both poignant and touch­ing. We care about these char­ac­ters and ache for them from the first page until long after the book has been closed and returned to the shelf. There’s the brood­ing and angry father, over­whelmed by respon­si­bil­i­ty, the over­worked and lit­tle- under­stood but car­ing moth­er, the jeal­ous, fright­ened, inse­cure sis­ter and the gold­en child, at the cen­ter of it all who, while search­ing for answers, tries to make sense of the world around her. The tragedy is wrench­ing yet, writ­ten with a fine touch, it con­tains no arti­fice, exces­sive dra­ma, or cloy­ing emo­tion. What we feel as we read line by line is life lived hour by hour and day by day. So spend a few hours or days with the Rosen fam­i­ly. It will be time well spent.