First published 2025
Mia Lowe has spent her childhood raising her younger sister Cricket while their single mother works to keep the family afloat in their small Maine town. Everyone knows the Lowe girls. Mia excels in school and handles the household responsibilities that fell to her too early. Cricket bounces with energy and natural talent, her sights set on soccer stardom. But athletic greatness demands sacrifices that ripple through the entire family. As the sisters grow older, their mother's hidden past begins to surface, complicating their already uncertain future. Mia fears that falling in love will trap her in the same patterns that shaped her mother's life. Cricket's single-minded pursuit of her soccer dreams threatens to pull her away from the sister who raised her. The bonds that once held them together now strain under the weight of competing desires and the question of how much one person should sacrifice for another.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Maine
Period: 21st-century
368 pages · Hardcover · The Dial Press