AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES by Alice McDermott

Sometimes I like books with good characters but scant plot, and sometimes I don’t.  In this case, I enjoyed the book for its lyrical writing and vivid sense of place.  Three children—Margaret, Bobby, and Maryanne—accompany their mother, Lucy, twice a week to visit her three unmarried sisters and her stepmother, Momma.  Momma raised all four of her sister’s girls and married her sister’s husband after her sister died in childbirth.  The author treats Lucy’s three children as sort of a collective entity that is observing and listening to the interactions among the adult women, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their father to rescue them.  Despite the languid pace of this novel, I was never bored and chose just to savor every word.  The tragedies of the past haunt this family, but their story is not really morbid.  Then we have the occasional anecdote, such as the story of Momma arriving in the U.S. from Ireland literally penniless because she spent all of her money on chocolate during the voyage.  My only problem with this book is that sometimes I had to remind myself which generation was which, as the author fuses the past with the present at times, and we even get a brief glimpse of the future in which the three children are adults.