In the narrowest possible reading, The Last Life appears to be another entry in the well-worn coming-of-age genre, detailing as it does an adolescent girl's awkward, painful transition into adulthood. But told in reflection by the same girl 10 years later, Claire Messud's sprawling, beautifully wrought faux-memoir benefits from a much wiser perspective, exploring how three generations of knotty family history have profoundly shaped a young woman's identity. At first, Sagesse LaBasse, the privileged 14-year-old daughter of a French-Algerian father and an American mother, seems perfectly healthy and well-adjusted, with no greater concerns than filling lazy summer afternoons at her grandfather's three-star hotel on France's southern coast. But Sagesse and her parents are experts at maintaining this cheery façade, which conceals its dysfunction from the outside world. That changes when her grandfather, in an irrational fit of rage, shoots his rifle at a group of unruly teenagers, injuring her friend and turning the community against them. As the resulting maelstrom stirs up the LaBasses' clashing nationalities and bitter old secrets, Sagesse clings to her severely disabled brother, whose blank innocence remains constant regardless of the occasion. With graceful, enveloping prose, Messud leads her through the fickle cliques and stop-and-start romances of the average teenager while disturbing pieces of family history gradually come to light. At its core, The Last Life is about the importance of identity—sexual, ethnic, and familial—as a stabilizing force and the psychological scars collected by those who are robbed of its comforts. In every sense an exile, the older Sagesse bravely recalls the afflictive memories of "a home that exists only in the imaginary," a form of therapy that grows more poignant as the book progresses.