She loved the round of holidays, from January first – when she helped her parents toast the baby New Year in nonalcoholic foamy eggnog – to Christmas with its elaborate family ceremonial and gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins.

Then suddenly, when Vinnie was twelve, her parents moved to the city. In her new school she was skipped a grade, and found that had lost everything important in her life and become a disadvantaged adolescent – an undersized, pimply, flat-chested, embarrassingly plain ‘grind’. The pain of this transformation is something she has never quite got over.