Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator, "has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause."This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her--her mother and her close friends,"the Five Swans," and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband--and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.