This is a truly touching book about two women overcoming their pasts and loving each other. As a child, Macy has a crazy mother who runs away for a few days with the butcher whenever things get tough around the house. Macy and her first love, Maybelline discover their love for each other. Macy lives through the loss of her first love by living in her house and taking care of her while attending nursing school.
Dotty grows up in a house with her abusive father and horrid older twin brother and sister, Bell and Ray. Macy runs away after a fiery car crash involving her brother and sister on the day after her sixteenth birthday. She starts to work at the motel she stays at and meets Lila, a woman who sleeps off her peppermint schnapps and painkiller everyday, on the bus there. The two become friends of a sort, with Dotty looking after the ever-drugged Lila. At the amusement park nearby Lila is on a roller coaster car that is flung off the tracks into the sea, and drowns.
The two women meet while Dotty is painting the house Macy lives in, and falls off the ladder, shattering her hip. Macy the nurse helps her through her hospital stay, and moves into her house afterwards to help. They are forced to learn that their lives intertwine when Dotty's twin brother and sister come looking for her...
A very compelling read. I could'nt put it down, and I'm definitely looking forward to another from Amy Schutzer.

This lyrical, beautifully wrought love story between two women, Dotty and Macy, kept me involved long after I'd read the last page. They are trying to make a true, meaningful connection for the first time in their lives, after escaping homes tainted by abuse, mental illness, and catastrophe. Macy (who has taken on the role of home nurse and lover, a role fraught with peril) feeds Dotty just a few too many pain pills. As the issues between Dotty and Macy come to a head, they confront their pasts. This was my favorite part of the novel, a lovely suspense fed not by "What comes next" but by "What happened? Who are these people?" To me, it's the difference between eating a homemade chocolate cake, where you savor every bit, and rushing through a Hostess cupcake because you're late for work. Their pasts unfold as unique mosaics combined with the perfect amount of the surreal. As they confront their pasts, they confront their issues in the present through a deep, almost Jungian exploration of their inner selves. The novel asks hard-to-answer questions. Can they possibly break the patterns they've established to form an equal partnership, make a true connection? But that question is the universal question--can we break free from our pasts?--and so I keep coming back to it, months after having finished the book. I strongly recommend this novel.

When Dotty falls from a ladder, she is brought into the hospital where Macy works. Macy lives at the house Dotty was painting. Macy becomes Dotty's nurse after she leaves the hospital, and the two embark on a love affair. The past histories of both women creep back into their lives and threaten to destroy what's being born. Schutzer's circular and nonlinear story is full of potent writing and moving descriptions of the past pain and vivid silences both women have endured. And the surprise connection between Dotty and Macy is beautifully crafted. Schutzer's style reminded me a bit of Scott Heim, but not as dark. Any reader who's a fan of such emotionally charged works as Emma Donoghue's "Hood" and Alison Green's "Half-moon Scar" will adore this novel. This is one of my favorite novels of 2000!