Ginny Selvaggio is a 26-year-old woman who lives at home with her father, a doctor, and her overprotective mother. As the book opens, she is attending her parents' funeral. They have died years before their time, in a vacation cabin, of carbon monoxide poisoning. It becomes
…more obvious immediately that Ginny has a problem. She cannot look people in the eyes or read social cues. She responds to touch by screaming or escaping into a dark closet for hours. She has a photographic memory and becomes engrossed in esoteric topics. The author has Ginny tell her own story, and does a fine job depicting her disability via her behavior and her thoughts. As a psychologist who worked with children, I was able to diagnose Ginny's problem long before she herself became aware of what made her a little different. She was preoccupied with the idea of normality, and cut up advice columns, pasted them in a book, and read them often to remind herself that nobody really knows what normal is. Ginny has a younger sister named Amanda who feels it necessary to take over where their mother left off in protecting Ginny from the world. Without consulting her, Amanda decides to sell the family home and make Ginny move in with her and her husband and children. Ginny is aghast and gathers her strength to resist Amanda's plan. Forced to take care of herself, Ginny improves her coping skills. Instead of hiding in the dark, she thinks about carmelized onions, or sesame oil, or a favorite recipe. Ginny's mother taught her to cook, and she cooks for comfort rather than to actually eat. After the funeral, Ginny makes the bread soup that her Italian grandmother made and wrote out for her on a recipe card. As she finishes, her grandmother's ghost suddenly appears on the kitchen stool, wearing a Shaker sweater and white Keds (she died in the '90's) She gives Ginny a cryptic warning, and the rest of the book involves Ginny sleuthing to find out what the warning means. She deduces that all she has to do to summon a person's ghost is to cook a recipe written in their hand. But it only works once, so she has to be sure she knows what she wants to ask. This is not so easy, and she summons several ghosts before she can understand the issues. She is supported in her fight to remain independent by her mother's cleaning lady, the Cuban-Jewish Gert, who not only gives her good advice, but also provides her with a way to get out of the house and make a life for herself. There were a couple of twists that caught me by surprise, which usually means I'm so busy enjoying the details that I don't stop to think about where the book is going. There is a lesson for us all in Ginny's growing understanding that appearances can't be trusted, that normal is indefinable, and that communication is difficult at the best of times. (less)
