'The routine is punctuated by visits or the occasional glimmer of an event, such as when the Queen drives by on her visit to Australia and the children glimpse "an arm in a long white glove, waving back and forward like something mechanical" (148). On the way here, Mrs. Jewell had even driven down North Street, and through the back window of the ambulance she'd glimpsed her house, small and crouched, blinds pulled down for the heat as if it slept" (132). While the novel's graceful poeticism is the opposite of polemical, a reader cannot help but consider the ongoing debate over vaccines and the reappearance of polio, including cases of polio-like paralysis in the United States.' (Publication abstract)
