Each narrator is a completely distinct and interesting character, and the ways in which their lives intersect are always entertaining, always compelling. Watts is particularly skilled at weaving the miracles into her narrative, making them believable, and offering insights into the characters as we see her or his reaction to the Virgin. The minor characters who populate the town and the novel are richly drawn. Mixed Blessings made me laugh and cry and want to believe. Don't miss it.
Mixed Blessings is their story.
These three superbly plotted stories occur simultaneously, beginning and ending at the same time, with the characters and events overlapping, but each has its own separate section, told in its own narrator's voice. The characters Watts' uses to tell her story are about as different as possible, which is all the more interesting because all three were born and raised in the small backwater town. The first, Mayjune, is a frank young mother with her second child well on its way, whose husband, much to her dismay, doesn' t want to have sex with his pregnant wife. The last is a grieving gay man who has returned to his hometown from the New York to care for his ill, widowed mother, shortly after burying his lover. Watts perfectly, believably, handles all these viewpoints, with their relative dialogual difficulties and differences, with precision and, more importantly, beauty and empathy.