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“Michele Feeney allows the contemporary reader into the lives and loves, as well as the liabilities and limitations, of a time not our own. It is both reassuring and unsettling to realize that history repeats. I enjoyed this novel thoroughly.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
Mollie Crowley Reid, a schoolteacher, lives in rural Michigan with her husband, Tom, a store owner and farmer, and their adopted daughter, Cecilia, an art student. In the depths of the Great Depression, Mollie receives unexpected news that impacts the future of her family and makes the threats to their economic well-being even more daunting.
Facing these new challenges, Mollie fights to maintain her beloved career, her home, her health, and her family, all the while reaching out to help those around her as best she can. Cecilia, orphaned during the influenza epidemic of 1918, seeks connection with her biological family and her identity as a student and artist. Tom, with sometimes crushing responsibility, fights to maintain his livelihood and mental health, make sense of turbulent politics, and extend compassion and assistance in his community.
Through trials of illness, financial hardship, unsettling times, and family displacement, they discover home is not a place but rather the people who choose to love and support each other through life’s unexpected turns. And family, they learn, is built on shared struggles and love.