Idgie Says:
Karen pulls off another gem of a story - creating characters that have real life issues that are handled delicately enough so they do not drag you down into a maudlin state and make you too depressed to read further. This is a talent that is sometimes hard to find in a story.
These women have real issues and experiences that could hold them back from living life. Merritt has hidden scars from several life incidents that make her very wary of embracing anything. Her Stepmother is taking her own difficult journey and worries about nothing more than the welfare of her son.
Together they end up in a house that has an abusive history - and one very creepy attic. Without the sap, whininess or tears, this novel tells a real story about life and healing.
I will add as a personal footnote that several times during the reading of this novel I wanted to kick a few ladies around, tell them to grow a set and get the hell out. But alas, no one was listening to me. :)
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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: NAL (May 12, 2015)
Language: English
The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family’s buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret.
It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward’s husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal’s reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.
Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husband’s tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.
Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.