Mrs. Gallien has money, opinions, and recently acquired a wheelchair. Having made her fortune by giving freely, she's developed an irritating suspicion: most people are terrible at receiving. Their thank-you notes arrive on cream-colored stationery, penned in elegant scripts, and they say all the right things. And that's precisely the problem. They feel nothing. So she sets her brilliant, stubborn mind to solving this: she will find one person who truly receives a gift with joy, with passion, with something resembling genuine human feeling. Her young doctor, Sam Kendrue, becomes her unwilling subject. He arrives at her sickroom expecting a compliant patient and finds instead a woman who will stop at nothing to make him feel something, anything, real. A grand piano materializes in his foyer. Parcel after parcel arrives at his door. Each gift is more outrageous than the last, and each response is meticulously analyzed. But as the experiment intensifies, the line between doctor and patient blurs, and Mrs. Gallien discovers that the stingy receiver she's been hunting might be closer than she thought. It's a small, delightful comedy with teeth: Abbott observed that modern gratitude had become a performance, and she wrote this book to poke at that polite fiction. For readers who enjoy sparkling dialogue, eccentric protagonists, and novels that ask what we really owe each other.
