About this item
From the acclaimed author of Beach Plum Island and The Wishing Hill... "No one does it better than Holly Robinson." - Susan Straight, National Book Award Finalist and Author of Between Heaven and Here Catherine and Zoe are sisters, but even their mother, Eve, admits her daughters are nothing alike. Catherine is calm and responsible. Zoe is passionate and rebellious. Nobody is surprised when Zoe gets pregnant, drops out of college, and spirals into drug addiction. One night Catherine gets a call from Zoe's terrified daughter, Willow, saying her mother has abandoned her in a bus station and disappeared. Eve blames herself, while Catherine, unable to have children, is delighted to raise Willow as her own. Now, five years later, Eve is grieving her husband's death and making reluctant plans to sell the family's beloved summer home on Prince Edward Island.
About the Author
I never meant to be a writer. I studied biology in college because I wanted to be a doctor - preferably one of those doctors who's always jetting off to villages in Africa to save thousands of lives in a single weekend. But life intervened during my last semester of college, when I chose a class in creative writing. From the moment I sat down to write, I became completely absorbed in my work. While I was writing, seven hours could pass like seven minutes. To the horror of my parents, I abandoned the idea of medical school to become a writer, promising that, if I didn't get to be rich or famous in, oh, a year or so, I'd let common sense rule and find a real career. Of course, none of that happened. A year went by. Two. Then more. As I became even more engrossed in the writing process, I did what all writers do to support my secret habit: I worked a thousand odd jobs, from proofreading telephone books (really) to construction. I kept writing, filling up the corners of my life and lots of paper with words. Then one day, as I was driving home from the grocery store, a title floated across the windshield of my car: The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. After I finished laughing, my mouth went dry. I knew I had the title of my first book, which sets out to answer this question: How did my father, a career Navy man, end up on a farm with 9,000 gerbils?
