Goldengrove is a story about a family of four: a mother, father and two daughters, one getting ready for college, the other just thirteen. The older girl has a damaged heart unknown to her family until she dives into the lake and dies. Why read a depressing book?

Because this book is not about dying but about the natural and inevitable recovery that follows shock, grief, utter despair. It is a journey to an altered state. As with the physical body, a deep emotional gash patches over, healing but leaving a scar. And it occurs against one’s will, something programmed into the nervous system that makes the wounded return to life.

The story gracefully unfolds, revealing the private emotions and external façades of the family left behind. You can’t help but like them.

Margaret was the beauty, a mythic figure in the senior class for singing “My Funny Valentine” so poignantly that a man in the audience openly wept.

Nico, the younger, picks up clues to the mystery of sex, not just by the reaction to the sultry song, but by Margaret’s way of sharing an ice cream with her pal, Aaron. “Something about the easy, intimate way they traded tastes was what first made me begin to think they’d had sex.”

Nico is bereft. She tries to reach Margaret by becoming her, losing her sense of self by wearing Margaret’s clothes, adopting her taste in music, old movies, and secretly dating Aaron, whom her parents hadn’t liked.

The channeling of Margaret eventually takes a serious turn. Nico believes that she too has a defective heart. She feels a persistent ache in her chest until enough alarm rallies her parents to have Nico checked. They enter the hospital glum and morose.

On leaving with a clean bill of health, Nico notes, “The corridors and the hospital parking lot looked different than they had on our way in. My reprieve had changed them back into places where bad things happened to other people. The three of us walked to the Jeep with the duckling bounce of school kids who’ve been ordered not to run in the halls.”

The cadence never loses its hypnotic rhythm as the narrative snakes along to a satisfying close. Prose has one of those rare voices that can keep our attention regardless of the subject matter. Her metaphors are precise. Listening to her parents talk in the restaurant, Nico tell us, “My parents’ conversation was like elevator music.”

Two years ago, Francine Prose published Reading Like A Writer, in which she advises would-be authors to concentrate on the sentence. In Goldengrove, she puts proof into that pudding.