At 53, Rebecca Davitch - mistress of The Open Arms, a crumbling, 19th-century row house in Baltimore where giving parties is the family business - suddenly asks herself whether she has turned into the wrong person. How she answers, and how she tries to recover her girlhood self, is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel. As always with Anne Tylers novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave.