"Mattie Ryder is marvelously neurotic, well-intentioned, funny, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke. And her life at the moment is a wreck: her marriage has failed, her mother is failing, her house is rotting, her waist is expanding (and she's a perfect size 12 model at Sears), she has a crush on a married man, and her two young children are behaving the way young children in the midst of a divorce behave.

Then she comes upon a small rubber blue shoe - the kind you might get from a gum ball machine - and a few other trifles that were left years ago in her deceased father's car. They hold the clues to her messy upbringing, and as Mattie and her brother follow these clues to uncover the secrets of their past, she begins to open her heart to her difficult, brittle mother and to the father she only thought she knew."--BOOK JACKET.