Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River.
The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands.
But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice Mc Fee.
Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing.
Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.
Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life .
Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods.
At the age of ten, she starts running -- and forgetting -- lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret.
Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.
| Though | A milkstained note her mother |
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