So, I've finished my latest. This one dealt with a cast of characters starting with Margaret Hughes. Margaret is a seventy-something woman, living alone in a lonely 15,000 square foot mansion in Seattle. She surrounds herself with priceless porcelain figurines which she speaks to and are in fact her only source of "communication" in her self-imposed life of solitude. She finds out that she's got a malignant brain tumor and decides then, at the end of her life that it's finally time she started living. In doing this, she decides to open her house to a border. Enter Wanda Schultz, a twenty-something, tough-as-nails stage manager new to Seattle. She's left her life in New York to track down "the love of her life"- an unstable, jazz-loving alcoholic who left her with only a goodbye note to remember him by. From there we meet Troy - Wanda's assistant - who falls in love with her; Bruce, the southern, gay, catering Jew; Irma the 80-year old, bowling, Holocaust survivor; and MJ another character, searching for the love that fled.
Each character who enters this novel has a secret (even the porcelain objects in the house which turn out to have been pilfered by Margaret's father, during WWII from European Jewish homes). Each secret ends up have a full-circle effect on at least one character in the novel. It's a delicious journey...I loved it. I kept having "ah ha" moments when I would stumble upon the answer to a mystery. It was a feel good novel that made me cry at the end. A definite "must read".
