First published 2008
Frank McKotch stands on a Cape Cod beach in 1976, watching his thirteen-year-old daughter Gwen in her child-sized bikini. She stands a full head shorter than her younger cousin, and Frank knows something is terribly wrong. Gwen has Turner's syndrome, a genetic condition that traps her in a child's body forever. The diagnosis destroys the McKotch family. Twenty years later, Frank and his wife Paulette are divorced. Their eldest son Billy works as a Manhattan cardiologist, living a life built on compromise. Scott drifts through a pot-addled existence into suburban mediocrity. Gwen has become emotionally distant, brilliant but isolated. She constructs a hermetic world around herself until she falls in love for the first time in her thirties. Her unexpected romance forces the fractured family to confront the myths and self-delusions that have defined them for decades.
Genres: literary-fiction, medical, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-drama, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Cape Cod, Manhattan
Period: 1976, 1990s
416 pages · ebook · HarperCollins Publishers
Content warnings: medical-trauma