Piper Kincaid is 30 years old and has already endured three years of treatment for breast cancer. As she considers life with metastatic breast disease, she also returns to the year she was 14, when her mother left and she came to understand how lives get broken. In Greenwood's third novel (after Breathing Water and Nearer Than the Sky), chapters alternate between Piper's story today and 16 years earlier. Her mother collected broken glass and created beautiful pieces of art, but she couldn't live with her husband's fears of losing her. She managed to get away, leaving Piper and her older brother, Quinn, with their father, who eventually found a new girlfriend and ostensibly moved out. How Piper grew up that year without either parent, how she and her best friend, Becca, discovered performing, and how she became aware of the neediness and cruelty of others intersects with Piper's cancer ordeal. Greenwood uses glass to represent both beauty and baseness, creation and destruction, and life and death.
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