Elizabeth Taube is shy, chubby, unmoored, with parents as remote as
planets, and she takes love where she finds it: at the candy counter in
Frank's Five and Dime; in the dusty treasures revealed to her by Mrs.
Hill, the elderly black woman she cares for and steals from; in the
mirror at Furs by Klein. Elizabeth finds love in Mrs. Hill's cluttered
little house and she finds it in the gaze of Max Stone, age forty-nine,
teacher of English, father of three, and she takes it there, too,
watching for clues to who she might be, trying on selves for his
admiring eyes. And then, as she watches her high school basketball team
practice one day, love takes her completely in the person of Huddie
Lester, who "soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night." Huddie and
Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Huddie. Their great, urgent love takes them
both, into each other and into Huddie's narrow bed. Love takes
Elizabeth, Huddie and other characters in this rich novel into
unimagined places and unknown parts of themselves. It doesn't heal them
or save them or hand them a happy ending, but it takes them to harbor,
and points the way home.