McGhee, Alison

After a car accident in the Adirondacks leaves her older sister Ivy brain-dead, seventeen-year-old Rose struggles with her grief and guilt as she slowly learns to let her sister go.

An eleven-year-old girl being raised by a single mother in the Adirondack region of New York begins asking questions about her biological father and her maternal grandmother.

William, age 50, is barely going through the motions, trapped in the unspeakable hell unique to parents who outlive their children. After watching in helpless horror as a train kills his beloved only child, he is fired from his job, and his wife, as ruined by suffocating sadness as her husband, moves in with her sister. Meanwhile, William's treasured daughter-in-law seeks oblivion in the arms of a local carpenter, and nothing seems able to break through his pain.