These twelve stories, told from the viewpoint of young women in life's mid-passage, explore the splendors and miseries of love, both carnal and spiritual, cast back through sickness and health to the engraving experiences of childhood and forward to the rituals and release of death and its occasion for recall.

They tell us of a dutiful but not guiltless daughter faced with the wreckage a father has made of his life, to the pain of trying to steer steadily through a doomed affair with a dearly loves married man, of the ironies attending the funeral of a priest uncle and the birthday of an aged mother.

From the outwardly unremarkable frame of a single day-on Fire Island or in New York-an entire life and an encompassment of humanity are movingly conveyed. Then, with inverted telescope, the most subjective of inner realms is explored-through a hospital stay, a sudden name change, or the surprising end of all those dreaded piano lessons.

Taken together, these stories are a far greater whole than the sum of their remarkable parts, an unforgettable defining of the paradoxical toughness and vulnerability that define the mortal condition.