Beginning ~ in 1976

November 1976

"Grandfather, tell me about your mother."

He was silent as he smoothed my hair, and for a long moment, I thought he hadn't heard me.

"She was beautiful.  Her hair was dark, her eyes green, just like yours are."

"Do you miss her?"  Tears leaked out the sides of my eyes and made his shoulder wet beneath my cheek.  I missed my mother desperately.

"Not anymore," my grandfather soothed.

"Why?"  I was suddenly angry with him.  How could he betray her that way?  It was his duty to miss her.

"Because she is still with me."

What the Wind Knows ~ by Amy Harmon, 2019, fiction (Ireland), 8/10

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland.  Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes.  There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time.  The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken.  But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar.  Mistaken for the boy’s long-missing mother, Anne adopts her identity, convinced the woman’s disappearance is connected to her own.  As tensions rise, Thomas joins the struggle for Ireland’s independence and Anne is drawn into the conflict beside him.  Caught between history and her heart, she must decide whether she’s willing to let go of the life she knew for a love she never thought she’d find.  But in the end, is the choice actually hers to make?

Here are some more quotes to go with those I shared in the 2019 list of books read in July.

(p. 98)  "...my need to write things down, to preserve them, to give them eternal life, if only on a page."

(p. 140)  There must have been sadness in my face because the little boy patted my cheek with his grubby fingers, comforting me.
"Do you miss him?"
"Not any more," I said, and my voice quaked.
"Why?"  He was shocked the way I had been once, long ago.
"Because he is still with me," I whispered, repeating the words my grandfather had said to me as he'd rocked me in his arms.  And suddenly the world shifted and the light dawned, and I wondered if my grandfather had known who I was all along.

(p. 225)  "I had a teacher who told me fiction is the future.  Nonfiction is the past.  One can be shaped and created.  One cannot."

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click this link for more book beginnings.