Lovingly told tale of a disjointed family watched over by the Father Professor Mabie. ( )

This is a story of a messy family living in Whichita, Kansas. The Mabie's live in a big house and all there adult children live there too. Their oldest daughter, divorced, and her two children, Winston just out of prison for vehicle manslaughter and driving under the influence and the youngest unmarried daughter who works as a teacher's aide and gets into relationships with married men. It's a messy family. I've not read anything by the author. I guess she has written short stories and that some of this novel was taken from those stories. The author creates characters with lots of cracks. The oldest and responsible, the only brother, middle child and the youngest girl who always feels in the shadow of her older sister. The family all have to deal with the return of Winston and how they will handle his coming home after his prison time. Winston's father can not forgive him. His mother relates better to him as a person in prison that she can write. It is a story of anger, mortality, forgiveness.It was published in 2000 and the setting of the story would be 80/90s. People still had land lines for phones and airports didn't have the security and rules that we have now. I liked the first part of the book more than the second part. The author did a good job of creating her characters with their weaknesses, insecurities and strengths. The title came from page 17; "trust the advice of the injured, the damaged, those who had lived to tell." The book might suffer on the plot (a lot) but the prose is great. ( )

Point: My great-grandmother, the matriarch of my family, is finally eroding at the age of 98 and the rest of us matriarch-to-bes--my grandmother, my mother, and myself--have been deathbed-side for a month or so now as she goes. On Sunday morning she grabbed my grandmother's hands, whispered "Forgive me" in Spanish and then went completely under.Counterpoint: Some white people who live in a big house and nobody else cares about them. They do mean things to each other but don't really discuss why and the most interesting character in the book dies before the plot starts. ( )

Although this is a quite readable book, it fails to achieve 4-star status with me because some of the characters and their interactions are not quite believable enough. It's almost as though the author is setting out to create an "amusing" set of people, rather than a believable set of people. ( )