CHORUS

A large family grows up in Virginia over the course of the first half of the 20th century.

The Shaw family consists of seven children; a father, Jim, who works hard on the farm but is regularly forced to sell off land during the Great Depression; and a mother, Marie, who is often bedridden due to depression. After their mother’s untimely death, the children are affected to varying degrees, and they're divided over whether the death was an accidental overdose or a suicide, a debate which creates a rift between the siblings. Told in short, nonsequential chapters, the novel follows individual members of the family during significant moments in each of their lives: a teenage pregnancy, marriages and losses of spouses, decisions to move away, enlistment in the Second World War, and their own lives as parents. Some of the children are eventually pulled back to the family homestead after Jim’s death, and yet all navigate the distances—both physical and emotional—that have created lingering gaps among them. Kauffman has written a deceptively light tale about the heart of a family healing around a defining loss and siblings sustaining each other through adulthood, with lovely phrases and prose throughout. Though the sections are never weighty, together they form a satisfying story of complicated relationships against the backdrop of a “beautiful world [with] a forked tongue.”

A comforting and pastoral novel.