Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for My Darling Dead Ones (Knopf Canada, 196 pages, $26.95 cloth), by Erika de Vasconcelos. This, too, is a multi-generational novel about women and their relationships, primarily to one another. There are sibling rivalries, love affairs, births, and deaths. There are many characters (the family tree provided at the beginning is required to keep them all straight), many jumps in time (the thirties, eighties, nineties), many jumps in place (Portugal, Montreal, Toronto). Too many pieces overall for what is a fairly short book. Reading it is like watching a home movie where snippets from various events and years have been spliced together-lifetimes compressed into hours. There are many "scenes" in My Darling Dead Ones. They overlap, intersect, light one another, but never quite rise to be more than a series of anecdotes.