The world White has created for Della and the others seems only tenuously connected to the late 1990s. They inhabit a green and sheltered place where kindness predominates. The only two mean acts described involve a 1914 General Electric fan and a packet of treasured clematis seeds. White provides a list at the beginning that explains the tangled relationships of the 14 main characters. But the book's one weakness is that, aside from the sharply detailed Della, it's difficult to keep all the women straight.
People come and go as the seasons unspool, but most events are on a modest scale.
In May, Hilma and Meade spend Thursday evenings outdoors and carry rocking chairs into a pine forest, where they meet an ornithologist studying an endangered woodpecker. Roger's ex-wife takes Hilma to Florida to see the spring that William Bartram called the fountain of youth in his 1774 journal. These tales are enjoyable, but Quite a Year for Plums comes most fully to life when Della arrives. Della is a marvelous and original creation. An odd bird herself, she has nightmares about the yellow, shuffling feet of snowy egrets.