I would read anything by this writer. My favorite linguistic moment here is when she calls a fortune cookie "a short paper nerve baked in an ear". Moore's trademark wit and sharpness are filtered here through the narrator, an innocent Midwestern girl recently departed from the farm to start college, where she has a job as a babysitter for a jaded, careworn, sophisticated restauranteur who is adopting a baby. The plot doesn't entirely hold -- the narrator has an affair with a mysterious Portuguese student who turns out to be even more mysterious than anticipated, and the consequences of the affair aren't realistic. Also the book proceeds in lengthy descriptive passages, not always a smooth pace. The relationship between the young girl and the older woman is well done and mines touching territory. There are a couple of dark, wrenching scenes involving parenthood that really got to me. Overall, it can feel at times like a stretched novel -- paced more like a short story, but with more than enough stuff thrown in to make it a novel. It's highly imperfect, but I took in every word because line by line, she's just that good.