In Kent’s coming-of-age novel, an intelligent young woman struggles with her fraught relationship with her mother.

In the early 1940s, a 20-year-old woman named Leahis determined to go to college—in part, as an escape from her family’s cramped apartment in Brooklyn: “Sharing a home with her father, sister, and brother-in-law was bad enough, but the onslaught of [her sister’s]children had made it unbearable.” Leah is ecstatic when she’s able to move into a small room in a boarding house; at Brooklyn College, she falls under the spell of a handsome professor named Noah Oliver. He woos Leah with fancy dinners, and in time, the two get married; she gives birth to a daughter named Ninon, who becomes the focus of the narrative. The mother-daughter relationship is fraught from the beginning; Leah isn’t exactly thrilled by the challenges of motherhood, nor does she take kindly to interference from her mother-in-law, Linda, who loves to lavish attention on the little girl. What’s more, Ninon is a precocious child who’s able to read at a very young age. She finds traditional schooling to be a stifling waste of time, but as much as she’d like to participate in activities with adults, Leah reminds her repeatedly that Ninon’s her daughter, and not her friend. Leah’s parenting style is cold, to say the least, as she even unjustly blames Ninon for the death of a family member. At one point, Ninon says, not without reason, “My mother hates me. She has since the day I was born.” With time, can the two reconcile and reach an understanding?

Ninon’s childhood journey is extensively detailed, with references to Girl Scout cookie sales, summer camp, and a trip to Yankee Stadium, where a young Ninon gets to meet “the nineteen-year-old Yankee rookie sensation Mickey Mantle.” The latter might have been a rewarding surprise, but this event, like many others, involves an extensive buildup, with Ninon’s grandfather explaining, “I will get tickets for us at Yankee Stadium for the World Series, and I will even get to have you meet Mickey Mantle.” (The Mick, for his part, doesn’t have a lot to say, other than “We Okies la-ak to greet people with big be-ar hugs.”) Many other figures in the story state what they are going to do before doing it, as when one of Ninon’s later suitors announces that he’ll “meet [her] after work and walk [her] home,” before meeting her after work and walking her home. Despite all this unnecessary scene-setting, the more time that the reader spends with Ninon, the more likable she becomes—and the more grating her mother’s criticisms become. After one frightening mishap, her mother tells her that “your fatness buffered your landing, so you didn’t get killed.” As a result, it’s easy to feel for Ninon when she loses people who treat her more kindly, and it invests readers in the ongoing question of what Ninon will be like as she grows older, and how she’ll process the traumatic events of her past.

A sometimes-overwritten but realistic and often touching story of intricate family relationships.