The Book Report: Julia Ellen Hunsenmeir and her big sister Louise do WWII and motherhood and heading into middle age, with an excursion into grandmotherhood and infidelity. All of Runnymeade, Maryland-and-Pennsylvania, is agog, when they are not aghast, at the antics of the sisters. This book fills in some *huge* gaps in the storytelling of [Six of One], as I suspect Ms. Brown is out to tell the whole tale and not only the bits and patches from the first book. One side effect of this is that the characters sometimes shift...for example, Minta Mae Dexter was the leader of the Sisters of Gettysburg, where in this book it was Caesura Frothingham, previously known as the leader of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Fannie Jump Creighton, I am happy to report, is still busy seducing the young men of Runnymeade. SOME things must remain sacred. Oh, and Cora gets the surprise of her life in this book...plus we meet Chessy's, Jut's husband, mother...what a complete pill.

Readers of [Six of One] recall how Nickel, the stand-in for Ms. Brown, came to be...well, now we see a piece of her not-easy childhood with a crazy, vibrant, exciting, but utterly self-absorbed Julia Ellen for a momma. Some of the most moving moments in the book involve the mother/daughter mishegas these ladies endured.

My Review: I don't know if I'm unusual in this, but I feel very *proprietary* about characters and books in the series that I come to love. Since I adored the first book in this series, [Six of One], I came to all the others thinking There Is But One Way for things in this world to be. And then Brown, creatrix of the series, shifts things willy-nilly! How dare she! After all, these are *my* books!

Oh wait....

Still and all, I arrived at an explanation that satisfies me: Memories change when a person gets old. I mean, after all, those of us back here in our twenties can't imagine really what it's like to have a half-century of events stored in our brains! (Shut up. It's MY review.) And Brown published this the year she turned sixty, which we all know is somewhat older than God. So of course her elderbrain wandered and led her into little boo-boos. It's not her fault, I decided magnanimously, from my extreme distance in age. (Stop laughing!) And then I got into the swing of things, enjoying mightily the antics and the goins-on of the one-horse burg called Runnymeade. It was lovely to see Celeste again, and to know a little more about Rillma and her jam (figures big in this book)...well, it was good to see the old gang and I hope I can see them again. I suspect one reason Brown is writing the fill-in books is that her mother is now dead. She has to be, doesn't she? But now, after the generations before us have thinned out to few and far between, now's the time to get it down and keep it there. Before the curtain drops on our...I mean HER!...generation too.

If you have a romantic or sentimental bone in you, this series is for you. Order doesn't matter. Pick one up and laugh and cry along with the Humsenmeir sisters, it's a load of fun. ( )