Alice Fivey, fatherless since she was seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and enters "the San," submitting to years of psychiatric care. She is moved from place to place, remaining still while others mold her into someone different from her namesake mother. But they do share the same name. Is she then her mother? Alice consoles herself with books, and she herself becomes a storyteller who must build her own home word by word. Florida is her story, told in brief scenes of spare beauty as Alice moves ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, into adulthood and closer to the meaning of her own experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and, above all, the life-giving power of language