“[Ava] had always thought the main relationship in the family was the one between Nancy and her daughters. To have a family, you needed a father, of course, and Jimmy had played that role perfectly well, if you were okay with an old-fashioned interpretation of the job. But the Nickerson family was all about the women and their noisy, bickering, gossiping, interfering relationships with one another.And now it seemed that maybe she ahd been looking at it all wrong. Maybe she and Lauren were just the icing, and the basic, underlying cake of the family was the couple in front of her who had a shared history she knew very little about.”

“She wasn't sure who were family & who were friends, and maybe they all were both, and maybe it didn't matter one bit.”

“Lucy wondered what it was she had found. A boy who wanted to be a writer. And a family who had picnics under the stars. She felt as if she had lost something. After all, that family now lived only in the pages of an old diary.”

“I had always thought that the relationships we make strangers are the hardest and the relationships we have with family the easiest. For me the opposite had been true. The family I was born into was not really my family anymore, while the family I made for myself out of strangers was mine.”

“she felt a sudden, unexpected surge of hope. Despite the tragedy they'd all gone through, this was what a happy family looked like; this, she thought, is what a loving family did when they were together. For them, it was nothing but an ordinary day on an ordinary weekend, but for her, there was something revelatory about the notion that wonderful moments like these existed. And that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible for her to experience similar days in the future.”

“Being a woman in India is an altogether different experience. You can’t always see the power women hold, but it is there, in the firm grasp of the matriarchs who still rule most families. It has not been easy for Sarla to navigate the female path: she has become a master traveler, but one with no pupil. She thought she might develop this relationship with one of her daughters-in-law, but the others, like Somer, didn’t quite fill the role. And when they had babies, they relied on their own mothers, leaving her once again in the company of men. But now, Sarla muses as she glances at the clock, anticipating Krishnan’s arrival, she will finally get her granddaughter.”