A sharp and moving portrait of Ray — judge, single parent, and tightly leashed woman whose survival strategies seem suddenly to be coming apart

Ray, a single mother and superior court judge, pounds a punching bag in her basement to manage her anger. She has concluded that life must be lived tightly leashed or chaos will move in. Her prime directive is to protect her daughter, Armada, from life’s unruly forces. Ray deftly handles other people’s problems, managing her courtroom and the politics of the judges’ chambers, and defusing her neighbors’ battles, all the while staying above the fray. But when her feckless, sweet brother re-enters Ray’s life, bringing unpredictability and wayward emotion with him, and her sexy, but enervating Guatemalan ex crashes into her world, she realizes that her carefully piloted ship is not watertight after all — it’s no better than a sieve. Cascading events reveal to Ray that suffering cannot be held at bay and that life must be lived in all its messy glory.

Peopled with a cast of characters for the ages, from the eccentrics that surround Ray’s courtroom and her street to a flock of recalcitrant hens, and laden with her trademark sly wit, this is Strube’s best novel yet — sharp, intensely humane, moving, and funny.