At just under 300 pages (41 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue), this was not a long read. I got it through the Amazon Prime First Reads program back in the summer of 2023. The audiobook, for those who are interested, is a little more than ten hours.
Set in the fictitious town of Muscadine, Louisiana, this novel has a dual timeline and is told through multiple points of view. The main cast of characters are Meemaw and sisters Rayanne, Sue Ellen, and Savannah. The main storyline is told in the present through the points of view of the sisters. The past timeline is handled almost like flashbacks through Meemaw's point of view with the purpose of explaining certain things in the present timeline.
Here's a short summary of the book: In 1994, Savannah's twin sister, Georgia, disappeared. For the past nearly three decades, she's been presumed dead, though a body has never been found. Twenty-eight years later, Savannah and her sisters are all back in their hometown to dig up a time capsule they buried twenty-five years ago. Inside, they find a photo from the day Georgia went missing with a mysterious woman in the background. Convinced her twin is still out there somewhere, Savannah persuades her sisters to help her look into this stranger, sending them down a path of family secrets and eventually the right answers.
***Spoilers***
Our book begins with a prologue that sets up the entire premise of the story. It's 1997, and sisters Savannah, Sue Ellen, and Rayanne have buried a time capsule in the backyard of their childhood home, promising to come back in twenty-five years to retrieve it. It also serves to set the mood of the overall story. These sisters have suffered incredible loss in their young lives. Their mother had just died, their father has left them, and Savannah's twin sister, Georgia, is still missing after three years, presumed dead. And now they're going to live with their Meemaw in her house full of things she can't bear to get rid of.
From there, the book swaps back and forth between the past and present day, with the present day timeline taking up a majority of the narrative. The past is told in third person point of view from Marylynn's perspective, a.k.a. Meemaw, and seemingly jumps around quite a bit. It goes from the birth of the girls' mother in 1969 to the death of her husband in 1979, then to Beverly's teenage years and the introduction of the girls' father, Jack, in 1986 and 1987, and finally to Georgia's disappearance in 1994 and all that came after in 1996, 1997, and 1999.
These chapters told from Marylynn's point of view serve a few purposes. They act almost as flashbacks, filling in some gaps and information about the history the girls were too young to fully understand and/or remember or that they weren't around for. But mostly her chapters serve as character development, not only for herself but for the girls' parents. They not only explain why Meemaw is the way she is in the present timeline (a hoarder), but also provide insight on the girls' mother, Beverly, who died of cancer when they were young and their absent father, Jack.
Marylynn hadn't liked Jack Guidry from the moment her daughter met him. He was living on friend's couch after having dropped out of high school to work at the mill and being kicked out by his parents. But despite her best efforts to put an end the relationship, Beverly still got pregnant before graduation, married the good-for-nothing bum, and went on to have three more children with him.
Then in the summer of 1994, the unthinkable happens. On a day in July, Beverly took the girls to the lake. Meemaw met them there, and in true Marylynn fashion, started an argument with her daughter over Jack. She told Beverly that Jack was cheating on her, but at the time she didn't know with whom. Sometime during this argument and Beverly's subsequent storming off, Georgia disappeared. It wasn't until five years later that they learned what happened. A man named Levi Morrison confessed to killing her, though he doesn't reveal the location of her body until the end of the book.
Beverly never recovered after Georgia's disappearance. Three years later, she died from lung cancer, and Meemaw took in Rayanne, Sue Ellen, and Savannah. Unknown to the girls, she told their father to stay away, although it bears noting that he barely put up a fight to keep them. Living under Marylynn's roof was not easy on the girls. Meemaw was strict and overbearing. She followed the girls on dates, embarrassed them at public events, and once even dumped manure on a boy's front lawn after he called Sue Ellen a mean name.
Now, in the present day (2022), the girls are scattered and estranged. Rayanne, the oldest, is living in Baton Rouge with her wealthy husband, Graham. They have two children, Tucker and Charlotte, whom Rayanne refuses to bring to Meemaw's house for visits. Sue Ellen, the middle sister, left town as soon as she was able and moved to New York City where she works as a professor at NYU. She never comes home, rarely communicates with any of her family, and can't seem to make any relationship last. Savannah, the youngest, never left Muscadine. She works as a waitress at a local restaurant and lives with her bum of a boyfriend, Colton.
For the first time in probably a decade, all three girls are back home, fulfilling the childhood promise they made to dig up their time capsule. The only problem is that the house isn't theirs anymore, and the woman who's living there won't let them on the property. So the sisters decide to sneak into the backyard in the middle of the night. This is a comedy of errors, really. First, they dig in the wrong place and exhume the family dog. Then, when they finally find the time capsule, the home's current tenant confronts them with a shotgun. As they're fleeing, Sue Ellen gets hung on the fence and is very nearly shot.
When they go through the time capsule, they find a picture from the day Savannah's twin, Georgia, disappeared from the lake. In the photo is a mysterious woman staring oddly at the twins. They soon realize that this woman was one of their mother's friends from high school, and at the insistence of Savannah, who's never fully believed her twin is dead, the sisters agree to find this woman to question her about the events of that day. Turns out, the woman was their mother's best friend, Celia Peters, and she's been dead for three years, so it's a dead end.
But Savannah's not ready to put the mystery of Georgia's disappearance to bed just yet. She cannot shake the feeling that all is not as it seems, especially since she went to see the man who confessed to killing her twin, and he told her that he had never seen a little girl that looked like her. This understandably leads to a huge fight with her sisters, resulting in all of them saying things they regret and both Rayanne and Savannah storming off.
The fight is actually a good thing, though. Sue Ellen, the only one who couldn't leave because she doesn't have a car, gets pulled into helping Meemaw with some canning, which leads to an enlightening conversation that makes Sue Ellen realize that Savannah isn't going to be able to move on until she has definitive answers about Georgia. So she reaches out to a local cop for help. That cop, by the way, has had a crush on Sue Ellen since high school, and they find themselves in a relationship by the end of the book.
Rayanne goes to see their father, who asks to be part of her and her children's lives before asking her for money, which pretty much proves to her exactly the kind of man he is. She does use the opportunity to ask him about Celia, though, and his reaction and response plants a seed of suspicion that will eventually bear fruit.
After driving around aimlessly, Savannah ends up at the local bar, where she finds her boyfriend in a make-out session with a married woman. It doesn't come as a surprise to her as she's suspected something was going on for awhile. She breaks up with and tells him to move his trailer off of her land, but she knows that's a long shot as they've been down this road before. When she gets back to Meemaw's, she and Sue Ellen have it out and mend some bridges. They come up with a crazy plan to get Colton off Savannah's land and out of her life. Seriously, this was probably the funniest part of the book, and they're lucky they didn't end up in jail.
At the end of the weekend, Rayanne and Sue Ellen go back to Baton Rouge and New York, but two weeks later they're back in Muscadine. This time for Meemaw, who Savannah found unconscious in the kitchen floor when she come home from work one day. Turns out, Meemaw has been keeping a secret. She's in the final stages of lung cancer. Marylynn dies in September, and her funeral turns out to be the key in uncovering the final secrets of the past.
It's at the funeral that one of Beverly's friends from high school, Christine Dupree, reveals the truth of why Celia Peters left town all those years ago. She and Jack had been having an affair, and Beverly discovered the truth of it herself when she walked in on them sharing a moment at the trucking company where they worked. Christine revealed that she helped Celia buy the bus fare to leave, and that she suspected Celia was pregnant. A fact that Jack himself confirms when the sisters agree to meet with him. Ultimately, the sisters reach out to their half sister, Evangeline, and invite her and her daughters into their lives.
The book ends with the sisters cleaning out and selling Meemaw's house. Savannah uses her portion from the sale to build a bed and breakfast on the land she bought on the lake. Sue Ellen has accepted a professor position at the University of New Orleans. Rayanne is still living in Baton Rouge with her husband, but she's loosening the reins of her control and repairing her relationship with her husband.
As for what happened to Georgia, Levi Morrison, the man who confessed to her murder in 1999 then told Savannah that he didn't do it, made a deal. In exchange for a life sentence instead of the death penalty, he revealed the location of all of his victims, including Georgia. Finally bringing closure to the Guidry sisters.
***End Spoilers***
So, final thoughts. I thought this story was beautiful and poignant. It was so relevant for me, both as someone who's spent my entire life in the South and in terms of my own experiences with my father. Parts of this were a bit on the nose for me in that regard, honestly, and brought up some feelings I'd rather not feel, if you know what I'm saying.
The character growth was phenomenal, and I think the author did a good job with the psychology of birth order with the sisters: the anxiety and need for control in the oldest (Rayanne), the feeling of being invisible and doing anything to be seen in the middle (Sue Ellen), and the impulsivity and almost selfishness of the youngest (Savannah). I really loved how the sisters, even when angry and at odds, never really gave up on each other.
I also think she did an excellent job of showcasing poverty in a small Southern town and in how she developed the hoarding tendencies of Meemaw, who was such a dynamic character. So misunderstood at first glance, but truly attaining legendary status by the end of the story.
The writing itself was beautiful and the perfect balance of description and dialogue. I never felt like I was just skimming through endless paragraphs of pointless description or inner monologue that doesn't actually add to the plot.
So, do I recommend this one? Absolutely yes. Five stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment