Fifteen-year-old Alice dreams of her first kiss, goes to sleepovers, makes
prank calls, auditions for Our Town, and tries to pass high school
biology. It's 1975, and at first look her life would seem to be normal...and
unexceptional. But in the world that "genuine and fully developed talent" (Washington
Post) Leslie Pietrzyk paints, every moment she chronicles is revealed
through the kaleidoscope of loss, stained by the fact that Alice's mother,
Annette, without warning, apology, explanation, or not, deliberately parks her
car on the railroad tracks, in the path of an oncoming train.
In the emotional year that follows, Alice and her older brother find
themselves in the care of their great-aunt, forced to cope and move forward
after their catastrophic loss. Lonely and confused, Alice absorbs herself in
her mother's familiar rituals, trying to recapture their connection - only to
be stunned by the sound of her mother's voice speaking to her clear as day as
she flips Sunday-morning pancakes. Driven to understand who her mother was,
Alice distances herself from her girlfriends and brother as she engages in
"conversations" with Annette. As Alice works through her grief, she slowly
begins to see Annette as an individual - separate from simply "my mother" -
and ultimately embraces the bittersweet knowledge that the lives to which we
are most intimately connected often remain the most mysterious of all.
