"A beauty supply store owner of a certain age loses her husband, and thinks that’s the end – but her friends rally around her, and various members of her complicated family (her sister, her daughter, the stepson who’s come into her life as an adult) still need her love and competence. A funny, moving story with some smart things to say about aging, mental illness, and how a mother’s work is never done."

"The breathtaking beauty of Alameddine’s prose alone makes this compulsive reading. Its true genius, however, lies in the sacrosanct ideas that the narrator—a translator of books that will never be read—lays bare with humorous irreverence, wry insouciance, or intellectual outrage. She is fearless in looking at aging and death, the morality of war and survival, and the true meaning of a meaningful life. She also gives advice on not dying your hair blue in bad light."

"This book offers the best scientific guide to anti-aging and the perplexing question of why we age in the first place; in the future, Blackburn’s work on how DNA degrades over time could stand up as the key breakthrough in the field. The fact that Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009 testifies to her important findings, but it is also a symbolic victory for all the women who did major historic work on DNA, brain chemistry, space exploration, and other fields without receiving their due."