"Not since high school had she fallen in love, and she wasn't sure how to go about it anymore. It used to be easier." So muses Amy Bostick, the new science teacher at an exclusive private school in Riverdale, New York. Surrounded by the boundless dreams and energies of bright, wealthy students, Amy and other teachers test the dividing lines between youth and adulthood. How did their lives turn out so differently from what they once thought they would be?Evoking a melancholy beauty that is breathtaking, and writing with an intimacy that is almost painful, Benjamin Markovits depicts four characters in four seasons wrestling with various crises in father-daughter relationships - and at the same time their own hopes and aspirations. "She hasn't given up; she hasn't become less curious about the world," biology teacher Howard Peasbody observes about his long-lost friend and one-night lover, the mother of the daughter he didn't know he had. "The sight of her always warmed him slightly, like a mug in the hand on a cold day," English teacher Stuart Englander reflects on a student young enough to be his daughter, old enough to be his mistress.During a single school year, all of these teachers will discover that although there is much about their lives they cannot change, they can make certain ... adjustments. And as if in harmonic counterpoint, independent of their teachers' dramas, their students are pushing forward into their own future selves. One of them, Rachel Kranz, has to learn from her father's death to make her own difficult passage into the world of adulthood. Read Less