TAPESTRY

A young girl struggles in her relationship with her overbearing stepmother in Alexander’s second historical novel in a series.

In Greeleyville, South Carolina, in 1918, 12-year-old Gaynelle Bell lives a difficult life on her family’s farm. Her stepmom, Jessie, seems bent on making everyone’s days joyless, and her 16-year-old sister, Vivian, hasn’t been herself lately. Gaynelle finds escape in the stables, where she reads books that her father, Clayton, secretly gives to her. Nearly a year ago, the town doctor, Stephen Connor—who may be Vivian’s biological father—offered to pay for the older girl to attend boarding school in Charleston. However, Jessie has been secretly slipping poison into Vivian’s tea to keep her at home. Clayton takes Gaynelle on visits to Aunt Anna, the widowed best friend of the sisters’ late mother. Gaynelle is fascinated by a tapestry in Anna’s house: “It depicted a young woman in a high tower. Impossibly-long, honey-colored hair flowed out the tower window to the ground, where a raven-haired young man in royal garb stood.” When the poisoning—but not the culprit—is discovered and Vivian is sent away to school, Gaynelle is left to fend for herself against her stepmother’s cruelties. She thinks her handsome prince may have arrived in the form of new farmhand Tommy Salters, but Jessie proves a daunting guardian. Alexander’s prose ably replicates the rhythms of speech—and life—in the 1920s South, as when Tommy bids Gaynelle farewell at the end of the harvest: “ ‘Your Pa just don’t need me right now. Leastways, not for a couple o’ months. But he will in the spring. We’ll figure it out.’….Winter had arrived, and they were making their final goodbyes.” The novel does take a while to get going, but once it does, readers will find themselves hooked by the more dramatic elements of this coming-of-age tale. Fans of the previous volume, Silk (2021), about Gaynelle and Vivian’s mother, will likely get more from this sequel than newcomers will, but all are likely to find much to enjoy here.

A richly embroidered story of early-20th-century rural life in South Carolina.