This book is full of witty and insightful dialogue and passages but fails for me in that it's missing a strong plot line. I didn't understand why things were happening and why.

Straight away we discover that Cora, our heroine, is pregnant. The first 100 pages are spent getting to know Cora, her relationship with her screen writing partner Bud who seems to be co-dependent on Cora and follows Cora as she meets and falls in and then out of love with Ray who turns out to be the father of her child. I didn't understand their relationship, why they got together, what their fights were about or why they thought their relationship would work at all.

The next part of the story details the arrival of Cora's terminally ill friend William who she has decided to care for in his final days. Again, there is no real explanation as to why this is Cora's role, it's just something that happens. Cora turns to Ray for support and he is there for here. When Cora recovers, they break up again. During this time is when Cora falls pregnant, it fell like a clumsy plot device to me.

The book then jumps again. In the space of a couple of pages Cora discovers she's pregnant, decides how she feels and what she is going to do about her pregnancy and then... well her mother decides that they should break Cora's grandfather out of his nursing home and take him home to Texas... as you do! There is very little mention of the either the mother or the grandfather before this point in the story making this feel very out of nowhere.

There is a lovely link to Cora's child and grandfather at the end but it's a very small pay-off for a largely non-cohesive story.