A gala is a festive celebration, an abnormal interruption in life's routine. Gala is also Greek for milk, and thence the source of those astronomical splashes the galaxies, especially our own Milky Way. Milk is also linked to our infancy and hence our origins, genetic and familial. Linked so to life at its personal origin and its widest impersonal extension, milk is too valuable to treat lightly, yet we must not cry over it spilt.

Such observations are brought home to our business and bosom by [Gala]. Its narrator is the father of a 14-year-old girl nicknamed Milk…. Milk is exuberant, amusing, and lovely….

Milk is also hopelessly retarded, brain-damaged from birth, and almost completely deaf…. [In] this fictional sequel to his biographical Words for a Deaf Daughter novelist and father Paul West engages in a heroic endeavor to come to terms with the fact of Milk's flawed...