Leary’s novel examines the unpredictable costs of keeping secrets.
In the small, rural college town of Shelton, Pennsylvania, young peoples’ possibilities are determined by cliques: “In the Venn Diagram of Shelton (PA) High School, three groups intersect: faculty children, townies, and farmers.” As a farm kid, Wanda MacDonald is accustomed to being at the bottom of this social construct. She’s smart and dreams of becoming a nurse, but she instead marries her longtime boyfriend, David Zacek, a proverbial dumb jock. When David gets laid off from his factory job, he enlists in the Army without consulting Wanda and is killed by an IED when he is deployed near Baghdad. Lost in her grief, Wanda conceives a child with local misfit Whit Sutter and gives birth to a boy she names Macky, telling everyone the baby is David’s. Being a professor’s daughter doesn’t prevent Callie Morton, another Shelton girl, from making bad choices: While attending the local Brewster College, she falls for Greg Minot, a French professor 10 years her senior, and they run away together, a decision she will regret. Callie and Wanda eventually become unlikely friends as the author constructs a moving narrative about the impact of secrets: They truly need each other, discovering that confession is good for their souls and learning that they must admit and work past their mistakes if they are to move ahead with their lives. Leary's long experience as a teacher shines through as she reflects on how the educational system treats those from varying backgrounds in quite different ways. The novel’s structure, alternating between Wanda’s and Callie’s stories, proves effective, as the reader gets to see how both women flounder and then mature.
An engrossing story that reveals how small-town lives can have big complications.