Every So Often an author invents a story whose seeming simplicity and brevity result in a work of radiant power and broad-based appeal. Mrs. Hornstien is such a book.With a lyricism all her own, Fredrica Wagman writes of family, of passing generations, of love and striving, and of grief, loss, and renewal. Her narrator begins with a day burned in memory, when as a young woman in love she met her future mother-in-law, the eponymous Mrs. Hornstien. She concludes many all-too-fleeting years later, when she meets the woman her son would marry, and realizes who she has become.