The good things about this book was how vividly it portrayed the family's life with such detail it felt like I was there. That said, it made absolutely no sense to me why the family fell apart in such a way because of the rape of the daughter. Surely SOMEONE in this family had enough sense to talk about it. Did the whole entire community look the other way with not a single person intervening? I got the feeling this book was set in the 70's, but everyone sounds so puritanical or completely unable to deal with reality in an age when 'analysis' was all the rage that I wonder about it. How can a woman sacrifice her teenage daughter for her deeply-in-denial husband? And how did the daughter grow up with no sense of anger or remorse about the way she was brushed aside and hidden from view for the sake of her father? It's like she was a blank canvas! Maybe I underestimate small-town life. Maybe I'm too confrontational but I found it sickening how the one person who needed the attention was cast aside and nobody seemed to care, least of all her.