In actuality, although the book begins and ends with Claire, and most of the other plots involve something that coincides with her seventh birthday, it's really a collection of vignettes, some of which connect, about Ville Rose. The community is small enough that everybody knows each other, and sometimes Claire or her father will be mentioned, but the connections are loose, and most of the book can hardly be called part of Claire's story or even her family's.
I am probably the wrong reader for this book, since it's rare that I enjoy this sort of loose "novel," and only picked it up because it's on the shortlist for the Reference and User Services Association division's Carnegie Award for fiction, ALA's only single-title award for adult fiction. It's pleasantly written, and there's nothing wrong with it exactly, but it's too low key for me, we spend too little time with any one character for them to be developed, and even the setting is rather sparingly depicted. (It's contemporary enough that there are cell phones; that's the best sense of time that I was able to get.) Overall I was left without feeling like I had a reason to read it, aside from a personal goal to read all the shortlist books.
Overall: B