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Ella is a perfect Shelby Hearon heroine: sympathetic, harried, vaguely overwhelmed by life. She and her teenage daughter, Birdie, live in Old Metairie, Louisiana, where they struggle to get by on what Ella makes as a plant sitter. Still, the two muddle along cheerfully enough, with mom casually dating a slick real-estate agent and daughter enjoying her budding talent as a cellist. But when her beauty-queen older sister, Terrell, dies, Ella is drawn back into the orbit of her proper Texas family. Long ago she fled her demanding mother and professor father; now, as the surviving, not-quite-good-enough daughter, she finds herself criticized more harshly than ever. The story follows our heroine as she finds love and self-acceptance, which appear hand in hand. Hearon's books--including Life Estates and Owning Jolene--are odd creations. They jog along at an easy, graceless gait, somehow engendering a powerful sense of good will in the reader as they go. Maybe they succeed because the author is so handy at marrying style and subject. Her characters are haphazard, catch-as-catch-can types, and so is her writing. Sometimes this ease works nicely. Hearon sidles up to emotional nuances and captures them offhandedly, as when Ella remembers fielding a lover's declaration. "I had said, 'Not now,' gazing, like an idiot, at my watch. 'It's too soon or too late or something.'" Elsewhere, however, Hearon lets things get so loosey-goosey that you're not quite sure where she's going. Ella observes one of her clients: "She smiled, a very blond, made-up woman with a lot of energy and general good feeling, who might, in another life, have made a first-class waiter at the Pink Café." Said caf&eacut;e is the fanciest place in Old Metairie, and Hearon has set a scene there, but we're still not exactly sure what she's trying to get across about the character. Still, such loose ends are a small price to pay for a charming, not-too-light read. --Claire Dederer
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