Fingerbone is a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest. It rests along a lake that has the distinction of once having claimed an entire train that slid from a bridge into its dark waters one night, taking almost all on board to their deaths. Time swallows people in the same way in this sly book. The narrator is Ruth, a teenaged girl. She and her sister are raised, affectionately but haphazardly, by various generations of the women in her all-too-eccentric family. This is a book about women, making homes and leaving them. Even when the girls stay home, the days and nights pass and the plot goes nowhere in particular, Robinson arrives again and again in resounding places.—R.L.