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Synopsis
In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky's Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers' troubles. Poor and single, Maze's mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth's mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter.
The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Maze's earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day.
Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love.
This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.
Library Journal
Hinnefeld's second novel (after In Hovering Flight) begins with a letter from Maze Whitman to her former Berea College roommate Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) Cox. Maze regrets that they have lost touch, particularly because of the circle of women important to them both. At the center of their lives is Georgia Fenley Ward, a tall, large-boned, defiant Quaker woman. When Sister Georgia was 16, she fell in love with a black man, and her father sent her to Kentucky to teach at Berea College. Still there 60 years later, she meets Maze, a spirited, unconventional girl who finds nothing unusual about rooming with M.E., a musically talented black girl. Maze then meets Harris Whitman, a furniture maker and activist, and by 1963, Maze and Harris join M.E., Sister Georgia, and four others as squatters at an old Shaker inn. They are soon evicted, and they are all sent back into a world in turmoil. VERDICT This is a multigenerational novel spanning decades rich in history, but ordinary women, who suffer from life's challenges and keep secrets, are at the heart of the story. Recommended for its wide appeal to readers seeking thoughtful, well-written fiction.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., CO