In the mid-1940s, ten year-old Helen lives in a rambling old house, formerly a convalescent home, on a mountain in North Carolina. Her mother is long dead, her beloved grandmother has just passed away, and her father is leaving for the summer to work in Tennessee. Her father recruits a distant cousin, 22-year-old Flora from Alabama, to stay with Helen for the summer. Helen considers Flora a country bumpkin and a twit. Flora has suffered losses of her own and is determined to connect with and care for Helen. Helen learns to tolerate Flora’s pink-cheeked guilelessness when she realizes that Flora is a source of information about Helen’s mother and grandmother. Helen pastes together the snippets of family history revealed by Flora and begins to see a different picture of the past than she had imagined.
Foreshadowing is thick and ever present as Helen narrates their story from a decades-later vantage point, beginning with the lovely opening line:
There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.
It is clear that this summer isn’t going to go well for Helen, and waiting for that pivotal moment when we finally learn why is a perfectly measured torture.
There are so many layers to this novel, and days after finishing it I am still turning each facet over in my mind, finding connections and consequences and entertaining “what-ifs.” This is one for my top 10 list. A must-read.