I'm still pondering this book and its impact on me - I think I will be ruminating on it for a while - but it's not hard to give it the five stars. The writing is superb while being innocent and understated, and packed with deeper meaning. Been wanting to read it for a long time and now that I have, I am eager to read what my fellow Goodreads friends wrote about it in their own reviews. It's the kind of book you want to talk about; no wonder it was a book club favorite the year it came out. It probably still is. I would talk more about the ashes but that would be a spoiler perhaps... Suffice it to say that sometimes when you look for something in a book that you think you should see at some point, you find that that something was there all along, everywhere...