When Grace’s fifteen-year old son, Paul, plays a reluctant game of hide and seek with his little brother and climbs a tree, accidentally touching an electric wire, he is dead before he hits the ground. Now 56-year old Grace must face the worst of all nightmares; the sudden death of her child. When Mary, Grace’s oldest child, the only child from her first marriage, confesses she was the one who told Paul to hide in the tree, Grace knows that she should reassure her daughter that it’s not her fault. But she can’t.
Just six months earlier, Grace also lost her mother. As a child, Grace knew her mother was an odd duck among Wisconsin housewives of the 1960s. Her mother believed in spirits and spells, intuition and incantations, made up from her own fertile imagination rather than any kind of knowledge of witchcraft. Yet Grace was devoted to her mother and grieves her still. There is one thing that Grace just doesn’t understand about her mother; she never allowed Grace to play with dolls. And Grace wanted one, still wants one, with all of her heart and soul.
In a haze of prolonged grief, Grace wanders into a doll shop. She meets the owner, 65-year old Virgil, who opened The Nursery when his doll-collecting passion became too much to keep to himself twenty years before. Virgil mentions to Grace that he is leaving the next day on a buying trip. Once a year, he travels around the country, scrounging for dolls at flea markets and estate sales, ending up in Georgia with Brad, his long-distance lover, who has given Virgil an ultimatum: marriage, a possibility neither thought would ever be viable.
The following morning, when Virgil goes to his car, he finds Grace waiting for him, with a spare change of clothes, Oreo cookies, and a fat purse filled with the inheritance Grace’s mother instructed her to hide.
A scattered cross-country journey foraging for dolls in flea markets and in the backs of old barns leads to farms with five-legged cows, factories that make the sweetest of candy corn and personal crossroads. Grace must choose to surrender to her grief or rise from those sad waters and live in the love for her remaining family. After years of fear and promiscuity, rage and abandonment, Virgil faces the choice between his dolls and his shop, or the embracing the sudden new possibility of a real marriage to Brad and committing to his lover, and to himself.
With an eye for what we often try to hide and an unerring ability to reach into the ache and humanity of her characters, Giorgio has crafted a novel that explores the arc of grief and redemption as well as the way we endow things with meaning and memory.
Copies of In Grace’s Time are available at all major booksellers, including Black Rose Writing, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble
Print and Electronic review copies available upon request
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