After the sudden death of her husband, Anna Rainey is emotionally unable to return to the home they shared. Instead she becomes a perpetual house guest-going from friend to friend, seeking the solace and security in their lives that she no longer feels in her own. Each friend offers a different kind of comfort. Offers of advice are everywhere: join a support group, reconnect with family, find a new man. But these remedies fall flat. Ultimately Anna+s survival-hard-won and precious-comes in her own time. Lorna J. Cook creates a strong and endearing voice in the character of Anna and keeps the reader rooting for her until she finally finds the strength to go home.

Cook takes a careful but sometimes smothering look at grief in her second novel (after 2004's Departures), as a 30-something Michigander mourns the untimely loss of her beloved husband. After Dill's death from a brain aneurysm, Anna Rainey finds herself emotionally unable to stay in their home. She wanders from friends' sofas to a dormitory room to a small apartment, sometimes experiencing visitations from Dill's ghost and often feeling guilty: her failure to fix the garage door may have kept him from getting to the hospital in time. As if her grief makes her a magnet for tragedy, Anna befriends Jay, who hit a boy with his car in bad weather, putting the boy in a coma; she also helps counsel Sheena, an Upward Bound kid who's lost her father, and tutors Celia, a 10-year-old struggling to cope with her mother's death. Anna's mother, too, can't quite let go of Anna's father, who died nine years earlier. It takes gumption to let one's characters roam about unhinged and inconsolable, recovering only on their own terms and in their own sweet time, and in doing so, Cook paints a lucid and realistic portrait of loss. But she also creates a slightly wearying read: all unhappy families may be unhappy in their own ways, but young widows mourn—and eventually heal—in fairly routine fashion.