Lake Rose Davis is the only child of former hippies who settled in a small Idaho mill town in the late 1960s. Her parents' eccentric lifestyle makes Lake an outcast among the children of the town, and the unspoken tensions among the adults of her parents' social universe puzzle and disturb her. She ponders over her mother's infidelities and the mysterious resentment between her mother and her grandparents far away in St. Louis, and between her mother and her aunt, a conventional career woman relentlessly in search of love.

As a teenager, Lake joins her grandparents in Missouri and spends her youth seeking answers to her questions about the past, trying to understand the complex pattern of betrayals that shaped it. Only when she herself becomes party to a betrayal as devastating as any committed by her mother does Lake begin to understand.

Passanante writes with a keen eye for the details of behavior that reveal the yearnings and fears beneath the surface. She shows us that the path to understanding is never a smooth one, and that love is often far more complex than we can imagine. Western Literature Series.

Joy Passanante is the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and she has won several awards for fiction, poetry, and script writing including two fellowships and a grant from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. Her stories and essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes four times. My Mother's Lovers was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for best fiction in 2002 and for the Idaho Book of the Year.

— Western American Literature

— Kim Barnes

— Mary Clearman Blew

— John Sayles