Seeing the adult Lucy Barton on TV, Patty remembers her as a girl from a "terribly poor" family whose tiny house smelled. Patty is one of three sisters known in their youth as the Pretty Nicely girls. In my favorite story here, "Windmills," high school guidance counselor Patty Nicely intersects with or remembers most of the leading characters in the book's other stories. In a few cases, we experience remarkable encounters from different points of view in different stories. Neither novel nor linked story collection strikes me as adequate terms to describe this book's ingenious structure, in which characters reappear in each other's stories. Characters mentioned briefly in "Lucy Barton," such as "Mississippi Mary" Mumford, come to the forefront in this new book, set largely in the fictional Illinois town of Amgash and neighboring communities.
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