Telling the truth about their breakup is out of the question, because the cottage is up for sale, and this is the group’s last hurrah. But (surprise!) Wyn is there too, and he and Harriet have to share a (very romantic) room and a bed. She’s ready for a vacation at her happy place-the Maine cottage she and her friends visit every summer. So they keep it a secret from their friends and families-in fact, Harriet barely even admits it to herself, focusing instead on her grueling hours as a surgical resident. They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward. Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple-until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. The forbidding, kudzu-choked forest, complete with a treehouse, a murky pond, and an ominous clearing, is ideal for a coverup that compromises even the most irreproachable characters.Ī mild-mannered mystery with a moral quagmire at its heart.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation. The plot will only get more complicated because, in contrast to a White rescue story, we find even well-meaning Whites endangering Black people. The moment when Ellie, who at first warms to her new neighbor, realizes that Kayla is the daughter of Reed, the beau she forsook for the Civil Rights movement, is a classic Chamberlain complication. Ellie, now 65, returns after decades in San Francisco to care for her ailing brother and mother. It’s not long before past wrongs come home to roost.
Early on, we learn Kayla’s new house is on Hockley Street, where Buddy still lives in the family home that once was the only house in this wooded area. Fatefully, Ellie is assigned to work with a SCOPE contingent operating in her home county. Her father and mother are vehemently opposed, her brother, Buddy, somewhat less vehemently.
Ellie is the rare White Southern volunteer. In 1965, 20-year-old Ellie Hockley, a student at the University of North Carolina, joins SCOPE, a summer project recruiting mostly White, Northern college students to help Black Southerners register to vote in anticipation of the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Ann, a stranger, knows too much about Kayla, including that she has a small daughter, that she’s about to move into a new house in an upscale but isolated new development, and that it's a house she had intended to share with her husband, Jackson, who died of an accidental fall at the construction site. In 2010, architect Kayla Carter is visited by Ann Smith, a “sixty-five or seventy”-year-old woman in mirrored sunglasses, who comes to her office seemingly intent on scaring her. This is a novel of alternating timelines, each unspooling in or near Round Hill, a small town in North Carolina. Chamberlain’s tale of mid-1960s freedom fighters intersects with contemporary tragedy.
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