Brown's fictional world is filled with hundreds of people and animals, and in Bingo she seems determined to include as many of them as possible.

On the first page we are introduced to the dogs, Lolly Mabel and Goodyear, and their feline companion, Pewter, who accompany their owners everywhere in Runnymede and thus appear in nearly every scene. Then, of course, there is the narrator and main character Nicole (Nickel), her adopted and much older mother Julia (Jutz), and her still older Aunt Louis (Wheeze), all of whom were central to Six of One (1978).

Julia, at eighty-one, jogs several miles a day, while Louise is known for her life- threatening manipulation of a 1952 Chrysler. (She owns three, all bought four decades ago, so that using two for parts, she would never have to buy another car.) The rivalry between the older women and Nicole's efforts to keep healthy...