Joyce Maynard

"As the end of summer approaches and a long, hot Labor Day weekend looms, the life of lonely thirteen-year-old Henry Wheeler is irrevocably changed when he and his emotionally fragile mother show kindness to a stranger with a terrible secret."--back cover.

Following the death of her former husband, Cam, fifty-four-year-old Eleanor has moved back to the New Hampshire farm where they raised three children to care for their brain-injured son, Toby, now an adult. Toby's older brother, Al, is married and living in Seattle with his wife; their sister, Ursula, lives in Vermont with her husband and two children. Although all appears stable, old resentments, anger, and bitterness simmer just beneath the surface....

The lives and fortunes of two New Hampshire families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are entwined through the youngest daughters of each family, who were born on the same day in the same hospital.

In a small town in New Hampshire, a media sensation erupts over a murder case against Suzanne Stone, in which she is accused of persuading teenagers to kill her husband, Larry Maretto. Obsessed with becoming a TV personality, she viewed her husband's desire for children as an impediment to her career.

"The stories and poems in this collection address the physical and psychological trauma of sexual assault from a variety of perspectives and voices"--