🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

A searing and complex look at identity, sobriety, loneliness and longing — centering on the internal world of women, caretaking, motherhood, and the insidious push for disappearance into societal roles that, much as they may feel that way, do not ultimately define us.

Between these pages we will follow the lives of two North Californian sisters: Frankie Marino, a mother of two daughters, who must learn to live a life, in all its fullness, without the crutch of alcohol; and her older sister, Mere, crushed and isolated by the responsibilities of caring for a daughter (and likely a husband) situated on the spectrum.

Frankie and Mere’s lives will unfold in vignettes, in tragedies, backwards and forwards in time, and in language so beautifully written that the story will settle itself in layers, as if into deep and quietly brilliant carpets of snow, — an evocative backdrop to the beginning, and the end, of a tale that includes a winter storm, a missing person, and two individual and anguished journeys, which may or may not ultimately find their way to merge into one.

As the women each explore their pasts, the challenges of their current lives, and their relationship with their essential womanhood, motherhood, sisterhood and identities, it will become clear to the reader that love can be expressed in many languages, some of which we may be “still learning to hear.”

I loved this book, — a raw and tender exploration of all that it takes to be human, and the connections that can be seen to be there, once we are open to accepting them.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.