At the Seams

Piecing together the fabric of a family's loss.

For precocious eight-year-old Kate Nichols, life in suburban New York seems pretty ordinary for the late 1960s. There are ballet classes, pet bunnies and air raid drills, outings to grandparents' homes and humiliating boys in chino pants. She derives strength from the surgeon father she idolizes and her family's lineage of dressmakers, all of them sewers who plan and execute with precision.

But Kate's understanding of her world is shattered when...