I already read this - another copy. Found this one, as I recall, at the San Clemente Library book store in May or June of this year, 2013.

Copy of my review of another copy:

I loved The Good Mother and especially While I Was Gone, both by Sue Miller. I did not love this one as much and I have been trying to understand why.

The story is about a family more than about an individual. Yes, there is a main character - Nina - but her life is surrounded by the lives of her parents and siblings, and several chapters are from these other points of view. For a while I wondered if we'd ever get back to Nina, because I missed her.

The controlling force in the story is Nina's older brother Randall. Nina was the fourth child, Randall the third. Randall had neurological problems. They settled on calling him autistic but it sounds like more than that. Never mind. The label is not important. What is important is how his disability affected his parents and by extension his siblings.

In getting to the seat of it all, Miller weaves back and forth in time. Sometimes I felt we were thrown from one age to another, then back again, like a carnival ride. She takes in Nina's parents and their parents in her survey, which helps to provide a basis for the action.

Randall's parents felt very differently about Randall. It appeared to Lainey, his mother, that her husband David blamed her for the defects in this child. In response to this belief, Lainey goes on to have three more children - "perfect" - as a way of sorts of proving that she had nothing to do with it. Nina always felt out of it, different, because of this distinction, and her father jokingly referred to the three youngest as "the extras", the "unexpected guests", the "surprise party", the "little pitchers of health".

Her father was a psychiatrist. It appears that he took his profession seriously, extending his listening manner to his family. Which contrasted with Lainey's more excitable nature. At times I was irritated by David's steady, controlled manner, and at others by Lainey's uncontrolled outbursts or her attempts at joking everyone out of a funk. I did not become fond of either.

Nor did I become especially fond of Nina's older brother Mack, older than Randall but often seen as a kind of twin, the "perfect" twin. He felt pressured to perform at full volume for a while, until he threw it all away, again a response to the existence of Randall.

We don't get into the minds of the younger sisters to any great degree. We do meet Liddie, the eldest, and recognize that she uses her talent, her voice, to move her farther and farther away from her family and from forming any family of her own.

It's a compelling portrait of a family challenged by the one who is least aware of the others. For some reason, though, I never really felt sucked into it. Towards the end I could hardly wait for the last page, which differs from how I have felt when reading Miller's other books - that I would be sad to leave them behind.

Reserved for release.

On a table outside. In a plastic bag.