This is my symphony

The Sound of Glass (NetGalley)
Karen White
New American Library

You’re strong at the broken places.

This novel starts with a bang–literally–on a hot summer night in Beaufort, South Carolina. Edith Heywood senses an eerie change in the night sounds as she works in her attic studio, then sees a flash of fire explode across the sky. A thump hits the roof and something scrapes along the shingles, sliding into the yard with a thud. Grabbing her young son C.J. from his crib, she opens the front door to chaos: neighbors running, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Still not quite sure what has happened, Edith locates the object that landed in her back garden: a suitcase. It’s then Edith realizes she had witnessed a plane crash. Nervously, fearfully awaiting her husband’s late night return, Edith almost seems to expect the knock at the dreaded knock on her door. The police officer. The chaplain.

Fast forward fifty years and we meet another Heyward widow, Merrit, in the office of the lawyer who is in charge of transferring that same house–her late husband’s childhood home– into her care. A Maine native (who is blissfully unaware of her Yankee-ness, at first), she has left everything to take on the job of restoring the three-hundred-year-old home and cataloguing its antiques. She must also take on the job of restoring herself after her brief marriage to a hard and difficult man. Merritt is a woman who doesn’t want to call attention to herself, content to blend into the shadows.

And then another widow enters the scene. Loralee Purvis Conners is packing her ten-year-old son Owen into the car and moving from Georgia to—you guessed it—South Carolina to meet his older sister for the first time. One Merrit Heyward.  Loralee is a Southern gal through and through, right down to her high heels, big hair, and flawless makeup. She records bits of wisdom and lessons learned in the Journal of Truths she is writing, everything from “Sometimes it’s necessary to tell a lie when the truth will break a heart” to “Never give a lady a tube of lipstick without a mirror.” Loralee is as vibrant and alive as Merrit is bland.

And so Loralee and Merrit’s lives intersect, but not without some considerable conflict. Both women have secrets. Merrit’s secret has shattered her past and Loralee’s, her future. But like the sea glass wind chimes that hang on the porch of the Heyward estate, they tumble and toss together until they lose the sharp edges and become something beautiful. We learn about the death of Merrit’s mother and her estrangement from her father after his September-May romance with Loralee; we learn about the secrets Edith kept in her attic studio and buried in her garden. Throw in an adorable (and very precocious) little brother and a drop-dead gorgeous brother-in-law, and the novel is perfect summer reading.

This is a story about coming to terms with our past. Loralee and Merrit and Edith don’t suggest that we reinvent ourselves, really, but rather we come to find out the who our past may have obscured.