Nature is a temporal tool Dew uses in many ways. Trees are planted in the first chapter and reappear in later chapters, tall and mature, in chapters eight, ten, eleven and twelve, representing the passage of time. In Chapter eleven an unexpected out-of-season “freak snowstorm” allows Dew to characterize Lily and Agnes. Lily, pregnant and miserable, at first sees the beauty in the “snow on the honeysuckle and the trumpet vine…as if someone had strung Christmas decorations in her father’s garden.” But when she sees Agnes, also pregnant, and her two young boys playing in the snow, Lily feels “a plummeting sense of despondency and envy.” Furthermore, Dew uses Agnes’s mother, Catherine, to show how weather and the seasons can be used to move the story forward. Catherine’s references to the weather and nature in her storytelling about her youth in Natchez, with the oppressive heat, and her current life in Washburn, Ohio, move from the past to the present and reveal qualities of her, and others’ character. In one such story, Catherine gives her daughter, Agnes, a photograph of herself “when she was about Agnes’s age” and declares, “Have you ever seen a more beautiful girl?” This marks time and nature’s toll on Catherine and reveals Agnes’s rising star as a beauty in her own right.

Dew uses personal events such as birthdays, weddings, holidays, graduations and deaths to help the reader understand the ages of characters and their behavior. A flashback to Agnes’s visits to Natchez captures her grandmother’s death. Then this becomes tied to Catherine’s approaching birthday, an occasion that reveals how delicate Catherine’s sanity is and how much Agnes is forced to be the responsible member of the family.

Personal dates are tied to historical events as well, particularly the flu epidemic of 1918, which forces all the characters into action. Dwight Claytor objects to the fear associated with isolating school children. Pregnant with her first child, Agnes resents being sent home, out of town, to avoid contact with any infected people. Ultimately, the flu takes the lives of both Catherine Claytor and her son, Edson. This event leads to Agnes raising her youngest brother as her own and removes the original source of chaos in Agnes’s life, her mother.

Chaotic events are a fascinating time element in the novel. In Janet Burroway’s book, Writing Fiction, she explores the power of slow motion in novels. She writes, “moments of great intensity cause the senses to be especially alert—register more than usual…. In extreme crises people have the odd sensation that time slows down and the senses are clearer.” Dew shows this effectively at various points of crisis in the novel and it advances the sense that Agnes longs for a life with as much routine and predictability as possible. Catherine’s birthday breakdown takes a full eleven pages to unfold and resolve itself. All of chapter seven is a long lingering afternoon and following morning filled with false hopes and realigning alliances, culminating with Dwight Claytor attempting to enforce his views with violence. The slow unwinding of Agnes’s hopes in chapter eight is excruciatingly but effectively drawn out. The pie story from Lily and Robert’s wedding trip told early in the novel reappears to accentuate what an outsider Agnes is, and will always be, to the close group of Lily, Robert, Warren, cousins all born on the same day.

The end of the book is filled with crisis upon crisis—young Dwight’s delivery, Edson’s death, Catherine’s death, Claytor’s birth and John Scofield’s death—each filled with slow pacing and specific details. The moment of John’s death, which occurs in literally one or two moments as he loses his balance and falls, takes three pages. Dew writes Agnes in a disoriented state, watching Lily “kneeling over her uncle for a long moment.” Agnes “never even made the connection between this awful event and the several years that followed when she was more content than she had ever imagined in her whole life that she would be.”

In ways both common and uncommon, Robb Foreman Dew uses time to reveal depth of character and advance her sophisticated and compelling story. She does this, as Janet Burroway urges, with a balance of summary, scene, fully realized moments, memories, flashbacks, reflections, and slow motion crisis moments to “allow your reader to experience the story with the characters.” Chang adds to the notion of time’s importance to a well-crafted novel when she writes, “Time is a fiction writer’s medium, and she must learn to move her story through time in a way that will illuminate characters, the passing of entire lives as well as moments of stillness.”