As in a dark fairy tale, the actual events and the imaginings of the characters manage to echo many of the most basic parental fears - the baby who stops growing, the teen-age daughter who disappears. Left on the steps of an orphanage when she was just days old, Nancy Sunday was brought up in hardship – until the kindly Rosalind Carey took her in. I picked this up from Hollings Cancer Center's book sale shelf, conned by a reprinting into thinking this was a new Hoffman, rather than an old one decked out in a new cover. In the end, I wish there were some more loose ends that were tied, up, but it was really an enjoyable read overall.

Rosalind doesn't know what to think but she believes that there is far more to Piers than meets the eye. I loved the whole tea-reading-fortune-telling thing and Rae and Lila are interesting within their world's that lack--completely--celebrity and fame or anything very sparkly. Rosalind is determined to protect her family home, Rookwood Castle even when it seems she and her siblings have lost everything. Just a simple tale of unresolved grief and mothers who've lost daughters and daughters who've lost mothers and the men who love them in the best ways that they can.Like if I gave a book 5 stars when I read it on December 21, 2012 would I have given it 5 stars if I'd read it on March 12, 2009? Four young adult siblings are struggling - their father has traveled abroad to find exotic plants, that will make the family fortune, but he has gone missing; their mother, not the maternal type, has resumed her opera singing career. Piers has no choice but to ascquiese leaving Rosalind offering them a place at Rockwood until the mess is sorted out.

To me the characters were like something out of a Jane Eyre or Daphne Du Maurier novel, and I could often see myself imagining Judy Dench as Lady Pentelow, and Keira Knightly as Rosalind…the jury is still out in my mind as to who would play Piers! The Chalke History Festival announces a new name, new look, and tons for history buffs to get their teeth into! This contemporary world is set against a series of Russian folktales told by an old woman who lives at the edge of Manhattan, in a place so well hidden it can only be found once in a lifetime. She is married with two grown-up children, four grandchildren, and three beautiful great-grandchildren.Lila also moved from the NYC area to Los Angeles with a man, and that man is pretty much all of her life. I might agree with both, and also found it convoluted, messy, and unfocused—a novel where characters thrash without necessarily getting very far, not even in the narrative sense. Living hand to mouth and desperate to provide for the estate that depends on them, the Carey family are one debt away from ruin. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). I'm not usually one for trigger warnings, but this one may need it for child loss and suicide ideations.