A Fatal Car Accident That Leads to Startling Truths About the Home
Gina Left Behind
Gina balances between her current life in California and her past in
Maine. Torn between the two, she does what any architect will do. She
deconstructs her old childhood home piece by piece and with it, the
secrets it carries.
In the months following her parents' fatal car accident in Maine,
architect Gina Gilbert is coming apart: anxious with her two young
children, alienated by her clients' grand house dreams, and no longer
certain she feels at home in San Francisco.
While she and her sister Cassie are cleaning out their childhood home
on the coast of Maine, they stir up painful memories and resentments
over family possessions. A legendary collection of historically
significant letters is missing from the artifacts they unearth,
supporting a decades-old suspicion that their aunt or estranged cousin
has stolen them.
Threatened by the loss of the old house and its extraordinary seaside
landscape, Gina finds her heart swinging wildly between Maine and
California, creating conflict with her husband, Paul. To learn what
the Maine house means to her, she approaches it objectively, as an
architect, bringing it to life on paper. Her family's story unfolds room
by room: the darkroom from which her gentle but passive father, Ron, ran
his photography business, the kitchen where her volatile mother,
Eleanor, toiled under the weight of dashed dreams. As children, Gina and
Cassie warily navigated rooms permeated with toxic secrets hobbling
Eleanor and Ron's marriage.
As Gina deconstructs the house, startling truths are revealed,
changing family history and allowing Gina and Cassie to begin healing
family wounds. Gina has the chance to search the recesses of her heart,
too, discovering within her a vitalizing compassion and an awakened
understanding of what makes a house a home.
If you enjoyed books like The Dancing Girls, The Murmur of Bees,
or Little White Secrets; then you'll love Dream House.
