READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION
When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she’d left, that’s exactly what happens—Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children.
 
What she hopes to find is solace with “Bootsie,” her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories. Now Vivien is forced into the unexpected role of caretaker, challenging her personal quest to find the girl she herself once was.
 
But for Vivien things change in ways she cannot imagine when a violent storm reveals the remains of a long-dead woman buried near the Walker home, not far from the cypress swamp that is soon to give up its ghosts. Vivien knows there is now only one way to rediscover herself—by uncovering the secrets of her family and breaking the cycle of loss that has haunted them for generations.
ABOUT KAREN WHITE

Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone, The Time Between, Sea Change, The Beach Trees, On Folly Beach, After the Rain, Falling Home, and such Tradd Street novels as Return to Tradd Street, The Strangers on Montagu Street and The Girl on Legare Street. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia.

1. “Home means so many different things. . . . It’s where your people are.” The author creates such a dynamic sense of place for the reader through sensory details and evocative objects such as the heirloom black bed, the watermark from the flood, and the lost diary. What things or memories evoke “home” for you?


2. Does Vivien get the closure she needs with her mother once she returns home? How do Bootsie’s death, Carol Lynne’s dementia, and Vivien’s reliance on prescription drugs complicate things?


3. What is the effect of Carol Lynne’s dementia on those around her? As a reader, what was it like to encounter Carol Lynne only through her diary?


4. In one of her diary entries, Carol Lynne notes, “There’s something in the ways of mothers and daughters, I think, that makes us see all the bad parts of ourselves.” Do you think this is true? How does this apply to the Walker women? Does each woman grow emotionally from this realization?


5. “Because it was something I’d been born with, a poison in the blood I’d inherited from my mother and she from hers and way on back before anybody alive could still remember.” When they left home, what ghosts was each Walker woman chasing? What made each woman return?


6. Carol Lynne’s diary also reveals the following sentiment: “[Bootsie] just smiled and told me to wait until I become a mother, and then I will understand that my real destiny will be decided by those not yet born.” What does Bootsie mean by this? How do children shape the futures of the Walker women?


7. Did you suspect the identity of the body earlier in the novel? How does this “ghost” affect the lives of the Walker women?


8. How does the author use objects or heirlooms such as the watch and ring to unite the characters’ stories across multiple generations? Is there an heirloom you’ve inherited that is loaded with meaning or inspires curiosity about the past?


9. Did you have any trouble shifting between time lines, which run from the 1920s to the present day? Which era or woman’s story was your favorite?