a fascinating story, a poetic profile of humor and pathos, from children wandering the woods of Michigan with guns, shooting up street signs, easily fighting and fragilely loving each other, to an absentee father with a wicked sense of humor as his little flock of quail follow him everywhere they can, when not setting slot-machines to pay off every four plays and pretending to man their father's marina to collect money from the boaters needing gas on the days it is closed, giving all his guns away to bikers, and one binding a sister's diary pages in a book as a Christmas present to the parents. We feel, rather than read, the love for each sibling the author discovered just as they were leaving life. We are introduced to a never-seen side of the current American health care scene and poverty in the U.S.as it looks and is, or can be, even for our children who grew up wealthy. It is the story of a man born with the genes for genius, held down by a marriage to a nut the reader slowly comes to understand. The author takes a straight-forward look at the tragedies that befell her siblings, and the ultimate changes inside a little girl too smart to hide from truth but too loyal to look until forced at the "pockets of change" her father always had for her, and ultimately why that was ok, although meant as bitter recrimination by a mother in an age when families stayed together and kept their secrets; and the reader grasps, through a narrative laced with poetry, the daughter's gradual backing off and then re-embracement of a troubled family headed by the very untroubled, always happy Martha Young , taught by husband Paul Young to hunt and fish who from then on, always caught more than him, be it ducks or trout, and always in the author's world, ensuring the mother does not take off with her genetic descendants, guiding us to an understanding of how one day another woman now the family matron can smile with tears while thinking, "boy, our family..." It includes pages of photos of dressed-alike twins taken by Paul H. Young, and notes found at my parents' deaths that explain as many mysteries as they stir up. The memoir is peppered with what seem like natural history lessons until all the flies, birds, fish, and animals the readers learn a little about become the family, explain the family, as no one but a poetic-bent child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of men "who knew the names and songs of all the birds, and the names and properties of all the plants and trees" could do, and salted with subconcious feelings unfurled in short vignettes about someone who seems vacant, whose condition becomes slightly clearer with each slice offered, until the reader understands, and upon finishing the book, is glad the dad was finally wrong about something, something he told a 9-year-old more than 40 years before, laughingly; "no buck is going to come walking right up to you and stand there." But the pockets no longer contain just change."And a little lemon for it," Deanne ends one of her poems, written as a teen, and like the other few poems she includes that she wrote as a child and teen, it's significance goes on, and on, and on. This is one of those books you don't stop thinking about once you put it down, and you search for other works by its author, even while knowing there is nothing she has left unsaid.