susannah eanes

Phoebe Owens Price has raised herself literally by her own sharp wits from the poverty and ignorance into which she was born. Her dearest childhood friend, Sophie Patterson Harris, has done likewise but through very different means. Closer than sisters, they have always relied on one another and shared every secret –or so they believe. As adults, marriage and motherhood takes over their days and each of these two unique, spirited women strives for happiness and a sense of purpose in her own way. Through heartbreak and betrayal, Sophie and Phoebe come to realize that there are serious differences between the ways they each look at the world, but they manage to forgive one another’s faults and continue to be allies. Yet friendship and family ties clash with the difficulty of keeping it all together. Sophie and Phoebe find themselves in a constant battle between insight and accountability that seems to be leading to a better understanding of the world and their place in it –but is a better world really possible, given the ghosts of the past? And if so, at what cost?
One has no patience for ignorance; the other, the deep heart of a martyr. Religious belief and personal history wars with sanity and wisdom in this first novel of love, freedom, and the strength of friendship. Susannah Eanes explores the deep mysticism of family history, deception, and forgiveness in the tale of two women who are forced to confront the legacy of their youth, set in the deep south of the last decades of the twentieth century, and written in the unique language and viewpoints of the characters themselves.
Sophie, a student of classical literature, closet poet and diarist, is mentally and emotionally drawn and quartered by her inability to reconcile family love and responsibilities with her feelings for an ex-soldier who came home to run the family farm, but cannot share her secret life with the one who has been her closest ally. Phoebe knows something is not quite right with her friend but is at a loss to discover exactly what, instead judging her ruthlessly for the perceived sins of adultery and selfishness. The crisis that descends as a result forces them to face reckonings long buried, and the specter of fear itself.
Sexually charged and passionately descriptive, the rural landscape entwines around the lives and loves of two strong, yet troubled women, a beautiful contrast to the beliefs they absorbed as children. Only in moving beyond the past can they forge a way ahead not only for themselves, but for their loved ones. In so doing, each finds something vital that will give them the power and resilience they need to meet the greatest challenge of all.