THE POWER OF THREE

In this debut novel, three estranged sisters must reconnect to receive their inheritance and uncover familial secrets.

Annie LeBlanc, the protagonist of Larivee’s story, is living a happily married existence in Berlin despite the encroaching catastrophe of climate change and a rush of pandemics. On an otherwise normal morning, she spots a ghost across the train platform. At first, she doesn’t recognize the apparition. But when she gets home, she looks inside an odd box that she recently received full of old photographs from her hometown in Maine, and realizes it was her grandmother. Annie soon finds out that her two sisters, Jeanne and Mary, received similar mysterious boxes, and that all three are being called back home to Maine. Their father—a reclusive, harsh, and successful novelist—has died, and they’re required to be present at the reading of his will. After an emotionally charged reunion, the sisters arrive in Maine to discover that their father was fabulously wealthy, and has left them his entire estate, so long as they agree to spend at least one month together in their childhood home. This would be strange enough, but it turns out that Mary is also seeing ghosts and Jeanne has been observing them since childhood. As the sisters come to grips with their newfound affluence, they discover that their parents’ ugly marriage was more complicated than it seemed, and that their father may have been their protector all along. While a surprise to the three women, these secrets are well known to a small sect of locals (including another celebrated author) who have their own motives regarding the sisters. Larivee’s novel is not short on pathos. Fortunately, she has skillfully drawn the relationships between the three women, each of whom readers will happily follow. Many of her details are rich with the authenticity of lived experience, such as the author’s rendering of Berlin in an era before cellphones, “where a counter on the phone let you know how much you were spending, click, click, click. The longer the distance, the faster the clicks.” Readers looking for groundbreaking prose may not find it here, but those in search of a deeply felt, highly plotted family narrative will be delighted.

A vivid, engrossing portrait of a family amid the turmoil of death and revelations.