Little Ships: A Novel

After adolescent sisters Juni and Tilde Becker wake up one morning to find their mother dead, their grandmothers appear the very next day to scoop up the girls and their inconsolable father, Nick, and take them home to small-town Oregon. The women are full of loving resolve, but good intentions are small guns against the waves of adolescence and the young family's shocking history. Besides, the women--at ages sixty and seventy--are at their own crossroads. Across the months of spring, Nick reels from heartbreak and guilt; the sisters drift apart in the shoals of middle school; three marriages are tested; and the grandmothers seek new footing, in their own lives and with each other. There is no best way forward, but making-do offers the girls a path to the future; and the women discover they have surprising futures of their own yet to live.