Like normal people
By: Karen E. Bender.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 269
Subjects: Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.; Women with mental disabilities -- Fiction.; Missing persons -- Fiction.; California, Southern -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena, who is forty-eight but mentally locked in her childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena's day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena's widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them.".

"In the process, Ella relives her own life's dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena's handicap and her aching attempts to give her daughter a "normal" childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella's world. When Lena at last finds approximate normalcy - by marrying a man much like herself - Ella must contend with letting her daughter go."--BOOK JACKET.