First published 2003
Alice Fivey loses her father at seven. Three years later, her mother surrenders custody and enters a sanitarium for psychiatric treatment. Alice moves between relatives' homes, carrying her mother's name like a burden and a question. She shares the same name, so she must be her mother, mustn't she? The seamstress pins clothes on her, trying to shape her into someone else entirely. Alice finds refuge in books and discovers her own gift for storytelling. She moves from house to house, each placement taking her further from the wreckage her mother left behind. Through brief, strange encounters and moments of unexpected beauty, Alice learns to construct meaning from fragments. She builds herself a home using the only materials that truly belong to her: words. This story of an orphaned girl's journey toward understanding captures the power of language to create shelter when everything else falls away.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Florida
Period: 20th-century
152 pages · Hardcover · TriQuarterly
Content warnings: mental-illness