Beginning ~ with an accident

A Soft Place to Land ~ by Susan Rebecca White, 2010, fiction

In the months following the accident Ruthie and Julia imagined and discussed the last days of their parents' lives so often it was almost as if the girls had been there, had accompanied them on the trip out west.  Except of course they had not.  That had been the whole point of Phil and Naomi's vacation.

I'd already read the Prologue and Chapter One before I noticed (just now) that the author teaches creative writing at Emory University, where I got my Master's Degree.  Having typed the blurb from the back of the book below, I already know something momentous is about to happen in Chapter Two.  An attorney has just "arrived at Julia and Ruthie's house to read the will" (p. 40).

Summary:  For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children.  But on a vacation alone, the couple perishes in a flight over the Grand Canyon.  After the funeral, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will … not the least of which is that they are to be separated.  Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters’ journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to sophisticated bohemian San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, anger, and jealousy.  It seems as though the echoes of their parents’ deaths will never stop reverberating — until another shocking accident changes everything once again.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.