Some people remake the lives they were given from within. Mary Whitcombe begins as a girl who has had choices made for her — orphaned, sent away, sheltered and then exposed — and becomes, through a series of losses that would break someone with less core, a woman who chooses.
Nifora captures something true about the relationship between innocence and resilience. Mary’s naivety is not weakness; it’s a kind of wholeness, and every assault on it makes her more rather than less herself. The love she finds with the young gardener is brief but real, and its loss becomes the pivot on which the rest of the novel turns.
This is a book about what survives. The answer, Nifora suggests, is more than you’d expect — and far more than the world around Mary was willing to grant her.
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