My thoughts
This is my first book by this author. I did go get a copy of her previous one, The Girls In The Stilt House, after reading this one though.
Main characters: Nell, Evie, Hazel and Becca. There are a few more that play a big part in this story but these four will steal your heart by the end of this book.
This book is at the top of my favorites list. It will definitely be in my top twelve at the end of the year. I highly recommend this book. It's heartbreaking, beautiful, loving, hold your breath good. It will immerse you into a world of a mother's love. Another mother's need for control. And another mother's survival while allowing her child to live. To survive. To be free. It's just one you truly will not forget and will not want to put down.
This book had be just a bit confused at first. Trying to see where it was headed. Trying to figure out what each part was about. How they would come together. They came together in a way that had me in tears. Some happy tears and just a few sad tears. This author knows how to capture your heart. How to make you feel what a true mother's love is...
Told in two timelines and different POVs throughout. You get to know each character and what they go through. How they feel about each other. The fears they have. The love of sisters who are not true blood sisters but sisters of the heart. Of mother's. Mothers in ways that only a true mother knows. Even if not by blood. How they survive and keep each other safe.
There are a few characters in this story and it's fairly easy to keep them separate. To know who is who and what each has going on. How friends help even without knowing it sometimes. To be there for someone when it truly counts. The loss of a child. Not in death but in life. How a mother can go on knowing she did what was best. Even after she has lost everything else. Not knowing if she will ever see her baby again. Proof that your child is always your baby even when they are all grown and have their own family. In some cases anyway.
This is one of those books that you don't want to say a lot about what happened because you certainly don't want to give anything away. But it also is one that shows how much you have to trust people sometimes. How the most desperate of times make you do things you never thought you could. Or would.
A masterpiece in my opinion. A book with such depth and feeling. Do not miss this one.
Thank you #NetGalley, #SourcebooksLandmark, for this ARC.
About
From the acclaimed author of The Girls in the Stilt House comes a long-awaited novel both atmospheric and lyrical, a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love.
For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase—a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl—Evie—then left without her.
In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.
For nearly thirty years, Nell has kept a childhood promise to never reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in their mother's bookcase—a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, years their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl—Evie—then left without her.
In dual storylines, Nell, forty-two in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead, each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.
From a windswept ghost town long forgotten, to a river house in notorious Natchez Under-the-Hill, to a moody nightclub stage, Evie's other mother emerges from the shadows of Depression-era Mississippi in a story of hardship and perseverance, of betrayal and trust, and of unexpected redemption in a world in which the lines between heroes and culprits are not always clearly drawn.
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