This was by far one of the worst books I ever read, and I usually like the books Oprah picks. Somewhere inside this book was a halfway decent idea for a story, but it gets lost so fast in a waste of detailed descriptions of every character that ever had any contact with this family. I kept thinking that maybe the story would get better, get back to Marianne and what happened to her. But it doesn't, it just drags on and on about the mental unravelling of this family. I found it so totally depressing, and was happy to see that other readers felt the same way. Don't get me wrong, books don't have to be happy go lucky for me to like them, not at all. But this book has a heaviness about it that makes it painful to endure.