In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked." Now, in this offbeat history, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers sentences reveal about them. Along the way Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar....

Wynn Tynan, a young woman growing up in rural Maine, has been raised by her accomplished parents to be an artist. When Wynn's idyllic life takes a brief wrong turn--she becomes pregnant as a teenager--her loving but dominating mother is determined that her goals remain intact, and with reluctance, Wynn gives the baby up for adoption. At art school, she meets Patrick Foss, with his golden eyes, ragged sweaters, and single-minded devotion to his sculpture, and knows she has found the love of her life. But fate intervenes with a tragedy from her past, and Wynn's life spirals into nightmare.

One family's secrets, betrayals, and hopes, woven together through four generations into a tapestry of memory and love. A humorous novel of power and grace.

The Writing Master, a work of historical fiction set in 1856 in New Haven, Connecticut, is about Charles Cooper, a penman-teacher of handwriting-who is attempting to come to terms with his tragic past, and Lily Prescott, an unconventional woman with her own troubled story. When a brutal murder takes place just outside the city, Charles becomes involved in its solution.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn't own a television so he can watch the soap opera he's devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters--some comic, some calamitous--and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead. This haunting literary thriller is an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis.

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter, Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie's Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy. Rosie is forced to face the mistakes and failures that have plagued her--and Susannah, who has her own demons, learns to forgive.

Betsy Ruscoe, a single university professor in her mid-30s, is pregnant, and the man she thought she loved is not interested in fatherhood. At the same time, her dying mother begs Betsy to find the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth fifty years ago and then disappeared. Betsy struggles to cope with the changes in her life as she also sets out on a quest to uncover her mother's surprising history.