I will start by saying that I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I was hopeful because the book started well. I was caught up in the different character's voice's, their dialect and phrasing set each character nicely apart as the narration duties swung from one character to the next. I could taste the dust of the Lincoln, Texas streets where the main characters lived in poverty and racial seclusion and feel the grit of their disappointed lives begin to come into focus. However as the story moved along, where the focus should have sharpened it instead became glassy-eyed. The ear for dialogue and the amusing antics that peppered the beginning began to pummel the ears and ring a tad hollow. Moments where the characters did ponder their lives felt forced into the last third of the book and were not so much delivered as the quiet revelations' they should have been but instead were stretched thin with too many words describing too little. And the ending felt tacked on like a hallmark card on an undertakers door. On the whole there were positives to be enjoyed but I think in this case, the author's history as a playwright of much renown has let her down. There were no actors to give weight where the characters needed it nor could they convey with a look what the author failed to do with a paragraph.