First published 2015
Maggie lives in a cottage behind the Jarrett family home in Lupine, Oregon, where she arrived as a foster child thirteen years ago. Now she has two kids and a husband who moved to Texas for work. Mo wants his family to join him, but Maggie feels stuck. Her baby demands constant attention and her nine-year-old son Jay-Jay acts out so badly at school that teachers want him in anger management. Even Polly, her former foster mother, seems distant as she considers taking in a special needs infant. Across town, Dulce Quirarte cleans houses and works at a motel while raising her son Gus alone. She dreams in Spanish but speaks only English in her waking life, cut off from her family and culture. Gus asks hard questions about why he doesn't know Spanish or his relatives. Meanwhile, his father Gustavo writes from a Texas dairy farm where he's on parole, asking Dulce to bring their son and start over. As spring turns to summer, both women must decide what family means and whether to risk the lives they've built for the possibility of something different.
Genres: fiction, family-life, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Lupine, Oregon, Texas
Period: Spring, Summer
168 pages · Kindle Edition · The Permanent Press
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness