The problem with this book is that it has no centre. Moore can't decide if she wants it to be about the travails of 20-year-old Tassie who grapples with being a country girl thrown into the big city campus (alarm bells rang in my head at the pointedness of making her half-Jewish as well) or about the 40- something chef Sarah, with a mysterious past and who adopts a little girl of mixed race parentage.



For a large part of the story, Sarah looms uncertainly as a close-to-central character, likeable in a loopy kind of way as she faces the big bad world of adoption protocols. But in the latter part of the novel, she disappears without a trace when some trouble arises regarding custody of her adopted daughter.



Lest it be said that this novel is without a theme, Moore inserts interracial issues into the plot, albeit in a half-hearted fashion. These are dealt with in the weekly meetings that Sarah organizes in her home with racially-blended families who are grappling with the same issues of raising adopted kids. Like the reader, Tassie half-listens to the bits of arguments that float up the stairs into the children's room where she is babysitting the kid of these parents, occasionally scandalized and horrified by some of the more interesting nuggets randomly conjured up.



Throw in Tassie's heady and unsteady relationship with a would-be-Brazilian classmate with a tell-tale prayer mat in his room and we have an over-deliberate attempt to draw a parallel between Sarah and her baby Mary Emma (or Emmie from her initials) on the one hand and Tassie and Reynaldo on the other and to exoticize the story.



Occasionally funny, and with truly tragic bits that tug at the heartstrings (Sarah and her husband Edward's backstory about a bad parenting decision gone wrong still haunts me), the novel, however, is smaller than the sum of its parts.



Tassie goes through her experiences more as an observer than a participant and one can't help feeling that she is a little disengaged even when she tries to explain her bond to the little Emmie and her employers.



Even when she deals with a family loss, there is a sense Tassie goes through the mourning in a robotic must-feel-numb fashion. Part of the problem is that Moore does not quite get under the skin of a 20-year-old who is also a sometime guitarist. This musical aspect of her character seems to be more a stereotype rather than a defining character trait, and the clumsy references to it fails to give Tassie the person any more shape.



Coming from an author who has churned out genre-defining short story collections like "Self-Help" and the brilliant "Birds of America", I can't help but feel a little shortchanged by this novel.