From the moment I read the first few pages, I knew I had hit upon the most familiar, yet previously unwritten, words I had read to date. In a world where only 5 percent of children lose a parent while they are young, I had felt completely, utterly alone. No one I knew could understand my pain; I learned early not to burden anyone with it. The book takes the reader inside the mind and heart of an author who lost her mother at a crucial time (what time isn't?). When another has experienced the same loss, it is as though the words she reads are her own. Slowly, tenderly, she unravels the stories of other women who were orphaned (not meaning 'without parents' but technically defined as 'motherless') at a young age and gives them life. She beautifully and bravely takes the reader through her worst fears - having children, attaching to another person, dying at the same age as her mother. Hope Edelman, through a series of stories about women like me, has written my story. It is a book that healed a part of me previously untouched, and allowed me to finally take my place as a woman who would survive the most profound loss any child could experience.