Book Description

In this “vividly written” novel, an architect returns to her childhood home on the coast of Maine—where startling family secrets come out of the woodwork (Kirkus). Gina Gilbert has designed an ideal life for herself in San Francisco. But when a car accident takes her parents’ lives, she finds herself drawn back to the New England home where she was raised. Facing grief and painful memories of the past, Gina turn to her skills as an architect—dissecting her old home, and the generations of secrets it conceals. The Gilbert family’s story unfolds room by room: from the darkroom where Gina’s gentle but passive father ran his photography business to the kitchen where her volatile mother toiled under the weight of dashed dreams. But when Gina and her sister Cassie discover that a trove of historically significant letters have gone missing, long-buried truths are revealed, and family myths begin to unravel. To find the healing she needs, Gina must search the recesses of her heart, and reawaken her understanding of what makes a house a home.