I honestly wasn’t grabbed by the book at first, but as I read, I slowly became invested. Ruth, escaping from a failed engagement and tepid career, returns home for the holidays and finds herself sticking around to help her mother care for her father, whose dementia is worse than Ruth had realized. Ruth finds herself settling into the mundanity of basing her father’s diet off of online nutrition research, slowly mending fences with her mother, and colluding with a pack of her father’s former university students to create for him the illusion of a normal life. Interspersed with the story are her father’s journal entries from when he was besotted with her as a child; I like how they reflected the role reversal now taking place between them.