You know, I started reading this and I was a little disappointed, because it's clearly Frame drawing material from her family life and having read all three volumes of her excellent autobiography it felt at first a little repetitive. But this is clearly a fictional story - inspired by life events but not limited to them, and events move in different ways and have different outcomes. It also splits into following the surviving children separately, giving them equal space in the story with parents and childhood. So the disappointment was very brief - and even then Frame's prose is just so astonishingly good it's hard to tear away from it. I read the book in a single day, and each word is placed so precisely, so double-formed for beauty and quiet slicing unhappiness that you can see quite clearly, in this her first novel, just what Janet Frame would come to achieve.