A Beautiful and Sensitive Portrait of Sisterhood by an Acclaimed Author! Family bonds grow from grief in this complex and challenging novel. Kate and Mary have never had much in common; Kate is bound for Stanford and an MD, while Mary just wants to stay home and paint. Then their father dies, and the two girls must figure out how to support themselves and their mother, who is in a permanent vegetative state. Enter three young men who throw the girls' lives into even more chaos. Mary is drawn to Marcos, even with his violent past. Kate's boyfriend wants to marry her, but she is tempted by Andy, whose ambitions match her own. When the two girls are forced to come together to make a decision about the fate of their mother, they find that perhaps they're not as different as they always thought.