Books - Portrait of a woman who survives the mundane

NORA Webster, famously outspoken and impatient with the shortcomings of others, listens without comment as her Aunt Josie tells her, "Your sisters are afraid of you. They always have been. I don't know what it is." Recently widowed and struggling to cope with life without her teacher husband, Nora gradually emerges in this often painful narrative as essentially a survivor: nobody pushes her around; nobody tries to tell her what to do - or if they do, they soon give up.