“But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.” —Mrs. Richardson, page 269

i love books about motherhood and parenthood and character-driven based novels but this book was not for me. i personally rarely enjoy third person  omniscient povs and paired with ng’s writing style and the off-putting pacing, reading this book was kind of a slog!