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Rebecca, "a woman who rarely wept although she knew she would have been better for it," is a quiet, interior character who eschews color in both her photography and her wardrobe. Serendipity plays a huge role in her art and life. She rambles in the woods, often in the company of a neglected runaway dog, who adopts her, and gradually begins seeing things differently. Photographing birds, "it occurred to her that she had known much of life in two dimensions: raccoon, eagle. She had learned to know what things looked like but not what they really amounted to." When she stumbles upon a series of mysterious tiny handmade crosses planted in the woods, surrounded by what appear to be a child's mementos, she knows she's hit on a subject that will resonate. She gives little thought to the provenance of these makeshift memorials, though readers are likely to guess at their significance long before Quindlen spells it out.

The predictability, along with the fact that Quindlen's characters are either enormously sympathetic or just awful, are part of the easy gratification of this tidily constructed, resolutely uplifting romance. Like her bestselling inspirational chapbook, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen's novel makes a case for seizing control of your life. "People froze you in place ... More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest," she writes. "So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it."