Rebecca Davitch

Rebecca is the novel`s central character and protagonist, a slightly overweight middle aged woman who has become the de facto matriarch of a large, complicated, extended family. Widowed at a young age with three step-daughters and a biological daughter, as well as a business to run, Rebecca has evidently worked very hard at being what she sees as a success in all her responsibilities. As the novel begins, however, she has started to feel that in spite of her best efforts, her life has become something not her own, that she is living someone else`s life. In other words, and in what might be argued is the language of contemporary pop psychology, she is undergoing a mid-life crisis, a point at which adults in so-called "middle age" (the mid-late forties to the mid-fifties) look both back and ahead at their lives and wonder both what...