We first glimpse Marie Commeford as a child: a girl in thick glasses, observing her pre-Depression world from a Brooklyn stoop. An innocuous encounter with a young neighbor named Pegeen establishes the bittersweet refrain of this sometimes darkly humorous novel. Pegeen calls herself an "amadan," a fool. In Marie's precise retelling of her history, everything is connected: her first heartbreak leads to her career as a funeral director's "consoling angel"; her brothers brief time as a Catholic priest occasions her happy marriage; the urban blight that destroys the Irish American enclave of her childhood parallels family troubles.