Thirty-two-year-old Jess Abbot has lost everything: her job, her apartment, and-most heart-wrenching-her eight-year-old son, Chance, to a tragic accident. Haunted by memories and grief, Jess packs what's left and heads for the small mountain town of Pine Lake, where she takes a position as caregiver to an eccentric old woman.
A rumoured clairvoyant, Lucy is strange but welcoming and immediately intuits Jess as a "loose end" in need of closure. But Jess isn't the only guest in Lucy's large Victorian home. There's also Star, a teenage runaway with a secret too painful to share. And the little boy with heart-shaped stones, who comes with a hope for reconciliation-and a warning.
Soon Jess learns that she's not the only lost soul running from the ghosts of the past. She and Star have been brought together for a reason: to be saved by the very thing that destroyed them.
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[A gas station. That's all she needed, and then Jess Abbott could get out of this backwoods mountain town and return to the highway]***
(Lake Union Publishing, 1 September 2019, 336 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle, #AmazonFirstReads)
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This book took a while to get into and I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it. I was intrigued by the characters and wanted to know was going on. Who is Lucy, really? What does she know about Jess and Star? Who's Ben and what is his deal? It took 50 or 60 pages for me to really get into. It's worth sticking with. Trust me. I fell in love with the book, the writing, the characters, their lives and the events they find themselves caught up in. The book is very slow paced with the author drip-feeding just enough information to pull you deeper and deeper into the book. By the end, I was crying as the truth is gradually revealed with both happy and tragic results. This is a great book.
