The Worcester Tornado of June 9, 1953 blew seven-year-old Edith Brynn out of her bedroom window and began a year of upheaval and change. All around her, things were happening that first-grade had not equipped her to understand. Her mother, Kitt, was having a nervous breakdown brought on by a third pregnancy, extramarital intrigues, and the conflicts between her career as a translator of Russian poetry, and motherhood. Edith's father, Arthur, a devoted Communist, and veteran of the Lincoln...