Jamilah Fenestra is a working on her PhD and a medical student. She marries Robert Horton who is someplace on the spectrum, but probably the most insightful, upstanding, and kindest character ever created. Robert works as an assistant to a chef and is happiest doing the same thing every day. The marriage works and their child, Ghalen, grows up with his mother’s intelligence and his father’s wisdom. For much of the book it is a joy to observe how life might unfold if we always did the right thing. To provide one example, when Jamilah’s mother vociferously and insultingly disapproves of Robert’s “retardness” in front of her daughter and husband-to-be, Robert’s reaction is compassionate. Rather than feeling hurt, he can understand how a protective mother wants only the best for her daughter.
As random situations, some good, many bad, befall Jamilah, Robert, and Ghalen, Ghalen must perform the duties of an adult by the time he is 10 years old. He does so flawlessly, while Robert continues to offer astute and meaningful counsel. But as muggings, deaths, shootings, and incarcerations accumulate the arbitrary incidents begin to lose literary utility leaving characters, and readers, lurching and dazed.