BELONGING

In Fordyce’s novel, a teenager leaves her hometown in search of healing and returns decades later to face her painful past.

It’s 1977 in Bakersfield, California, and 13-year-old Jenny Hayes has a troubled home life. Her mother is a cruel alcoholic, and her father is passive and silent. Jenny finds solace in the prayer cards she collects, and from her friends and members of her extended family: her best friend, Henry Hansen; her great-uncle, Gino Vitelli; her cousin Heather Moretti; her aunt Hope Moretti; her loving grandmother, whom she calls Nonna; and her first love, Billy Ambler. After a catastrophic dust storm rips through her hometown, Jenny contracts a serious fungal lung infection, and a loved one, who’d shown her more love than her parents ever had, unexpectedly dies. After enduring years of her mother’s abuse, Jenny leaves for college with Henry, but they drift apart when he later becomes “increasingly secretive and distant”; only later does this reason become clear. By 2017, Jenny has built a life of her own, but she must return to her small town to face a tragedy and seek answers about her past. In a narrative that spans 40 years, Fordyce explores one woman’s quest for self-preservation in scenes that are punctuated with plenty of music, as well as plenty of tears. Woven throughout the story are religious quotes from the prayer cards that Jenny collects (“May I be at peace. May my heart remain open. May I be aware of my true nature. May I be healed”), which gives the novel an overall tone that readers may find soothing. The prose style feels naïve and gentle at the start, but the writing matures over the course of the novel, as Jenny herself does. The characters’ Catholicism plays a major role in the story, as does the fact that some people justify bigotry in the name of faith. Fordyce doesn’t shy away from this and other harsh realities, and her complex characterization feels fully realized by the story’s end.

A faith-based, character-driven novel that effectively tackles difficult topics.