urage,
             maturity and ability to love live despite everything that happens.
             "My mother died when I was four years old. It was a fact of life, but
             if I brought it up, people would suddenly get interested in their hangnails
             and cuticles, or else distant places in the sky, and seem not to hear me,"
             Lily reveals at the beginning of her tale. For someone her age, noticing
             that reaction and not reacting to it herself with obvious hurt or anger is
             very mature. When Lily calls her mother's death "a fact of life," it is
             not said in the downtrodden, depressed, giving up tone one might expect.
             Because she follows up the bare statement with her comments on people's
             reactions, the statement is less brutal to the reader than it otherwise
             ...