The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry

THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND by Patti Callahan Henry contained many of the elements in her earlier The Secret Book of Flora Lea, including dual time periods, setting in England, and a sense of a fairy world/fantasy. In this new novel, Henry introduces Clara Harrington, a young, divorced award-winning illustrator, and her mother, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who was famous for publishing a book as a young child, but who disappeared twenty-five years ago when Clara was eight. Clara has a daughter Wynnie, now also eight, and those two travel to London in 1952, searching for news of Clara’s mother because Charlie Jameson has found some of her papers after his father’s death. Through another quirk of fate, they end up at Charlie’s family home in the Lake District, a beautiful setting that reinforces the other-worldliness of this story even though it is based in part on a real person. There are quite a few coincidences and some repetition, but THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND was a LibraryReads selection for March and will appeal to readers looking for a bit of mystery and romance combined with introspection about mother-daughter relationships.