"Writing with her usual poise and cutting cinematically from one character's story to another's, Lively elegantly orchestrates these events while using them as a setup for another series of developments…. As she's done in so many earlier books, Ms. Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit, and the result, here, is a Chekhovian tale that's entertaining, even funny on the surface, but ultimately melancholy in its awareness of time and lost opportunities, its characters' apprehension of mortality and the limits to their dreams."—NYTimes