A lukewarm early offering by a gifted novelist. The story concerns a young man trying to leave behind his home of six sisters, but I suggest you skip it altogether in favor of one of Tyler's later, and much better, offerings.

Anne Tyler wrote this novel with circumstantial details of the Hawkes. Specificity is always her strong point and her ability to depict the genuineness of human's emotions and actions. This novel shines in breaking down relationships between people,love,kinship and friendship. Ben Joe Hawkes,her protagonist is a chronic worrier who left home to study law in New York. He proclaimed himself as reversible and his bizzare habit of reading up-side-down.

One day he made a phone call home and found out that one of his 6 sisters whom he haven't seen in 7 years returned home with a child. Apparently she left her husband...

Being the sole male member (after his dad passed away)in the family of 8 women including his eccentric mother and grandmother,he felt responsible when such 'crisis' occurred. Ben Joe decided to make the trip back home to look into this matter plus he also have an unfinished business to attend to. Things began to unfold,he also learnt a few valuable lessons and even caught up with his old flame,Shelley from this fruitful trip home. Ben Joe eventually realised that his family are independent and each have a life of their own and he should to.

I always admire Anne Tyler's conscientious writing style.This time she created a engaging and compelling family drama that illustrated the importance of family bonding, sharing,love and care,also finding your true self and the significance of what is leaving your family spread your wings and get your own life and not forgetting your root.

Ben Joe Hawkes has been surrounded by women his entire life. With his grandmother, mother,and all his sisters he has always felt like an outsider his life, plus he's a worrier. Ben Joe has come home after law school and surprisingly enough, this crazy visit to his childhood home send Ben Joe into an exhilarating battle with his own heart-where unforeseen love demands his surrender...

Only a rarely talented novelist could have written this fine book! It's funny, serious, touching, zany, delightful, revealing and more!

I read this book when I was a teenager. I have reread it since along with almost everything that Tyler has ever written. It is a good book. It is not a happy book. It is about life, sometimes life is not happy.

I became a Tyler fan as an adult and something reminded me of a book I'd read long ago as a teenager. Could that have been the same book? It was 'A Slipping-Down Life.'

Rereading it as an adult I could feel the emotions of Evie. That is a good book. When you can feel like an obsessed teen making stupid decisions when you are in your thirties, that is writing!

I found this book fascinating. Direct and perceptive, it examines the consequences for a lonely, fat teenage girl who slashes the name of a would-be rock star onto her forehead with a pair of nail scissors. What is so interesting is that Evie, the mutilated teenager, never once regrets her action. She only wishes she had taken control of her fate earlier, while Drum, object of her unvoiced obsession and owner of the slipping-down life of the title, lets himself be drawn in by her startling course of action. Every other character in this book, from Evie's sad, widower father to her best (and indeed only) friend Violet, seems drifting and unaware next to efficent, decisive Evie. I can throughly recommend this book to anyone. Not a word is wasted or misplaced by the author and the result is a startlingly vivid novel

I just read this book over the weekend because I became attached to it. This book leaves you wanting for more and the ending is horrifically sad. Probably one of the best I've read.

Four complete early novels by Tyler.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a bittersweet retelling of the history of a family, a family with its own peculiar insecurities and rivalries that is nonetheless bound together by love, even if the family members realize that too late. A quiet, slow-moving book, it is nonetheless an engrossing read filled with real, engaging, multi-faceted characters.

If Morning Ever Comes is a lukewarm early offering by a gifted novelist. The story concerns a young man trying to leave behind his home of six sisters, but I suggest you skip it altogether in favor of one of Tyler's later, and much better, offerings.

Morgan's Passing follows an eccentric named Morgan as he bumbles through his life, putting on one costume after another, one persona after another, in an effort to discover who he is really is. It's not him but the woman who falls in love with him who discovers that, though. A quiet, entertaining read.

I didn't think The Tin Can Tree lived up to the strength of Tyler's other publications. It concerns the aftermath of a little girl's accidental death and the effect of the death on the people who live in the same house -- her family and neighbors. While the prose and characterization, as always, are strong, the story isn't that compelling. It just seems to amble along to no particular spot in particular.