by Ann Packer
First published 2015
Bill Blair discovers three wooded acres in a rustic California community in 1954, decades before Silicon Valley exists. He buys the land impulsively, imagining the family he wants to build there. He marries Penny Greenway, drawn to her restless energy and hunger for life. They have four children together, but Penny struggles against the constraints of 1950s housewife expectations. She turns to art for fulfillment, though this choice comes at a steep price for the family. Thirty years pass. The three eldest Blair children have grown up and remained close to home. Robert becomes a doctor like his father. Rebecca works as a psychiatrist. Ryan teaches school. Then James, the youngest and most troubled sibling, returns unexpectedly. His arrival forces his brothers and sister to confront painful truths about their family and fight over what comes next. Each sibling tells their version of events, revealing how the past shaped them all.
Genres: literary-fiction, family-life, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: California, Silicon Valley
Period: 1954, 1980s
448 pages · Hardcover · Scribner
Content warnings: mental-illness