Description: Grace's father believes in science and builds his daughter a dollhouse with lights that really work. Grace's mother takes her skinny-dipping in the lake and teaches her about African hyena men who devour their wives in their sleep. Grace's world, of fact and fiction, marvels and madness, is slowly unraveling because her family is coming apart before her eyes. Now eight-year-old Grace must choose between her two very different, very flawed parents, a choice that will take her on a dizzying journey, away from her home in Vermont to the boozy, flooded streets of New Orleans--and into the equally wondrous and frightening realm of her own imagination.
Review Quotes:
"Remarkable. . . . If 'last things' means things that will last, then Offill's novel is one of them." --The New York Times Book Review
"Beautiful. . . . A gently funny tragedy about childhood and madness. . . . Pokes at the boundaries between reason and imagination." --Newsday
"Stunning. . . . Dazzling. . . . A delightful novel, rich for its voracious eye onto real and imaginary moments of quandary in the lives of its characters and in the larger life of the universe." --Ploughshares
"[A] gem of a first novel." --Los Angeles Times "Mesmerizing. . . . Pitch-perfect. . . . [Offill] writes with a heartbreaking clarity." --The Times (London) "Offill's debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family." --Publishers Weekly (starred)