A series of short stories that trace the author's family line from Scotland to the present day. The early stories are of course entirely fabricated beyond the dates and names, but the later ones are heavily autobiographical. Grouped together, they form a series that is elegiac without being sentimental. The disjunction between distant past and recent past is a little too jarring for me--I can see what she's doing, the connections she's making and the themes she's drawing out, but being able to see them doesn't make me feel them more. Each story stands well on its own, and the later stories about her parents' mortality and then her own are very moving, but as an organic whole it feels there's something missing at times. That might just be me, though.