In A Hollow Bone, Dawn Hogue creates a very believable set of characters whose lives are intertwined across three generations in an Italian-German family living in small town Sheboygan, Wisconsin in the mid 20th century. Anyone who has ever had a family will relate to these people and all their regrets, misunderstandings, and abiding love, despite their ongoing disappointment in one another. Through her excellent storytelling, each of the relationships that Hogue explores in her narrative reveals something poignant: mother-daughter, father-daughter, young lovers, husband-wife. This book is a real page-turner because you will want to know what happens to these people. Even more intriguing and lovely are those relationships that develop between neighbors, which are sometimes less fraught with expectation than the relationships between kin. Hogue captures it all in this tale of terminal illness (not just cancer, but life itself) filled with missed opportunities and second chances that come (almost) too late. For me, the sign of a really good book is that it makes me cry. Reading A Hollow Bone, I teared up multiple times. It is that good.
