This is a linked novel with the author's previous novel "My Name is Lucy Barton". The story focuses on the town that Lucy grew up in and the people in her childhood life, only now largely from their point of view. It is somewhere between a novel and linked short stories.
Though some characters, including Lucy herself, have moved away, most of the characters still hail from Amgash,
Illinois, a town of corn, soybean, and dairy
farms, where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
The damage that parents do to their children weaves through the
stories. Two female characters form a friendship by bonding over the
shared trauma of mothers who left their families. The sister of one of
them is so haunted by “the terrifying and abiding image of her mother
alone and ostracized” that she tolerates and even abets her husband’s
deviancy. The Barton children reminisce over the awful things their
mother did to them and while Lucy got away, her siblings did not. Nor did many of those who were more fortunate than she, which is the cautionary tale part of the story. Like a number of the movies that I watched over the run-up to the Oscar's this year, the thought "Get Out" ran through my head throughout the story.
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