Dolores Farrell, of Sherborn, Massachusetts, had her future all planned out: she’d marry an attorney, have sons who’d become attorneys, daughters who’d become patrons of the arts, and live in the shadow of Harvard University, thereby continuing her privileged, purebred Irish-Catholic legacy.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Dolores becomes a Long Island housewife married to a salesman, and must watch as all her children embrace lives and lifestyles quite different from what she had imagined. After all, did she ever expect one daughter to become a radio shock jock and one son to become a hard-drinking New York City cop? And then there’s the other son, a sarcastic cartoonist who’s missing a leg due to a terrible childhood accident. That, of course, was never part of the plan.

One day, the boy who used to live across the street, and is now a successful journalist, oversees Dolores hugging a six-year-old, olive-skinned girl—and smiling! That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would come naturally to Dolores.

Almost Like Praying consists of three separate stories the curious journalist reconstructs: one about the family’s Massachusetts and Long Island roots, another about the troubled early adulthood of the eldest son, and the last which details the curious relationship between Dolores and that little girl.