The Memory Trees

It's been eight years since Sorrow Lovegood set foot on her family's ancestral land: a Vermont apple orchard planted in the 1700s and maintained by a succession of tenacious but troubled women. Sorrow left after her teenage sister, Patience, died in a fire and their mother was taken into psychiatric care. Now, at sixteen, Sorrow anguishes over the "shadows in her memory" that blur her past; seeking answers, she returns to the orchard for the summer. Wallace paints Vermont in lush and occasionally eerie detail: the family cemetery, lined with black oaks marking twelve generations of Lovegood graves and peppered with inexplicably appearing antique trinkets, is a particularly unnerving backdrop for important scenes. Sorrow treads carefully around her reticent mother, her mute grandmother, and the suspicious townspeople while she pieces together details about her own childhood and her sister's death; in the process, she uncovers unexpected layers to a centuries-old dispute between sparring local families. Sorrow's single-minded fixation on her sister's fate doesn't allow for much of her own character development, but interspersed flashback chapters provide a rich, historic context to her quest; some follow Sorrow and Patience's last day together while others are vignettes from the lives of the girls' puritanically named Lovegood ancestors. This is a dark and brooding mystery about a matrilineal family steeped in tragedy, but a hopeful ending honors the enduring power of love. jessica tackett macdonald