"So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope..."

Loved Toni Kozlovsky, her huge Russian-American family, and her neighbors where Toni docks the tugboat she lives on. I was giggling by p. 18 at the foibles of her entertaining and quirky characters, but it was the novel's ongoing romantic tension, braided with the darker undercurrent of unresolved secrets in the family's backstory in the Communist-controlled Soviet Union, that kept me glued to her pages.

"No, the church was further from the living, closer to the dead and the unforgivable. The church was where she belonged... They didn't believe anymore in perfect outfits, perfect homes, even perfect afternoons. They'd chipped their China; they'd buried their parents. They knew."

This felt so true it broke my heart:
"...there had been times when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth..."

"She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people."