Sometimes angels visit with more mayhem than mercy under their wings. Enter Sam Theopolis, a pony-tailed New Ager who waits tables in an Ann Arbor restaurant called the Buddha Uproar Cafe. Sam quotes Black Elk, reads Sanskrit, and has a dicey history of death by drowning. It is he that the Woolman sisters, Martha and Ellen, have chosen as the caretaker for their decidedly loony mother Jessie. Sam's only recommendation is that he once saved a 12-year-old car from death by lethal injection. Sam is a cosmic clown with treasures up his sleeve. He keeps an absent-minded Jessie from permanently checking out of reality, and brings a healthy innocence back to the jaded Woolman household. Ellen, a recent widow, and her troubled young son, Stevie, begin to find Sam's strange spiritual undercurrents vaguely comforting. But just when the water seems smooth and serence, and the family on the road to recovery, tragedy strikes like a winter squall. With quirky characters reminiscent of Anne Tyler, and a skillful mixing of the magical with the mundane, this off-beat novel is guaranteed to resonate in the mind long after it is finished. "...seduces with poetic power and moves the heart."---People"!