SummaryAfter years of self-imposed, fearful reclusiveness inside
her home, Lucinda Hunter has started moving out into the
world. She has found her family and her isolation has
ended, largely thanks to Katanya Taylor, who ventured into
her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to
come outside. Now a feisty, somewhat irreverent teenager,
Katanya comes with her mother and grandmother to spend
weekends with Lucinda -- their initial connection stronger
than ever. Everything is going well. Yet Lucinda feels an urgent
anxiety, fearful that she will never have sufficient time
to spend with her own very elderly grandmother, that she
will never be able to absorb all the details of her family
history. She is racing against time. Yet she is happier
than she's been since childhood. And meeting Eli Carter,
her grandmother's doctor, presents an unexpected and
challenging set of new circumstances. Then, on September 11, 2001, the world is cataclysmically
changed. In the aftermath, faced with the shattering
repercussions that affect everyone and everything Lucinda
knows, she is pulled, finally, entirely, into a new
reality. With insightful sensitivity Charlotte Vale Allen explores
the hearts and minds of Lucinda, her friends and family as
they grapple with the terrible upheaval in their lives as a
result of a single day's events.
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