“The Story She Left Behind” is filled with characters who have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions and life events. It’s about women and creativity and living a life differently from those around us, and being ostracized for those choices. Patti Callahan Henry presents loss in many of its varieties: abandonment, death, divorce. In Henry’s capable hands, the story of a daughter searching for her mother is beautiful, made more lovely by the choice of two idyllic settings. The main character Clara is raised in South Carolina on the coast near Savannah. Her early days are spent fishing, searching for oysters, playing imaginary games with her creative, clever, doting mother. It’s a perfect childhood until the night in 1927 when her mother disappears.
Henry writes the story as almost a mystery. We don’t know what happened to Clara’s mother, and while Clara has a life she considers satisfactory in most regards, she constantly feels the loss of the mother with whom she had an incredibly close relationship for the first eight years of her life. She has felt the loss keenly, and now, 25 years later, when her own daughter is eight, she can’t imagine what circumstances might have caused her mother to leave her. Clara lives with her father after her ex-husband lost their money and their home due to a gambling addiction. She is an art teacher and illustrator.
Her mother, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, was a child prodigy and wrote a bestselling children’s novel at the age of eight. Her life after that was chaotic, but she finally met and settled down with Clara’s father, and they lived together happily. Bronwyn’s creativity was also a huge part of her life, and many thought her strange because she was unlike the other straight-laced women in their small town. Interestingly, Bronwyn’s character is based on a real character with the same initials who, like the fictional Bronwyn, wrote a book at the age of eight, published it at twelve, struggled to write another novel, and disappeared when she was a young woman. Henry imagines the pitfalls and tribulations that might cause a person to disappear completely.
On the other side of the channel in London, Charlie Jameson has been going through the belongings of his father, Callum, after Callum’s death. He finds a satchel with a handwritten dictionary of sorts in a strange language. In it is also a letter with the instructions that the contents be given to Clara Harrington. But the instructions stipulate that the satchel cannot be mailed to her, but must be delivered in person. So when Charlie reaches out to Clara, she isn’t sure how she can leave her job and home to travel across the ocean to retrieve her mother’s work.
Charlie’s family is well off, and while he offers to send Clara a ticket, she insists on doing this herself. Her father has not remarried, and they both mourn the decades old loss of her mother. Clara is desperate to find anything that might explain why her mother disappeared and hopes the mysterious letter and dictionary might shed some light on what happened to her. She empties her savings account and she and her daughter Wynnie book passage on a ship that will take them to England.
As Clara and Wynnie arrive in London, the worst smog ever envelopes the city. It’s difficult to breathe in the thick, sooty air that was poisoned by what they call “Churchill’s cheap coal.” Wynnie has asthma and the unhealthy air is dangerous for her. It is fascinating to learn about this event, based on the real event which lasted for days. Charlie takes Clara and Wynnie to the family’s country home where the air is clean and where Clara encounters strange links to her mother and their family.
Clara is thrilled to find that the papers in her mother’s satchel consist of a dictionary that her mother wrote with the key to the language that her mother created over the course of her life. Clara realizes that with this, she could translate the sequel to the book her mother wrote and perhaps make enough money to buy a home for her and Wynnie. But on the way to Charlie’s family’s country home, they are robbed and the thief steals Clara’s purse with her money and passports and the satchel with the documents from her mother. While they are able to rescue some of the pages, most of the work is lost.
In the small town in Cumbria, Clara finds that the local theater group is putting on a stage adaptation of her mother’s book. As Clara and Charlie encounter more and more clues that seem to lead to Clara’s mother, they wonder about the link between their families.
There’s romance as we witness the burgeoning relationship between Charlie and Clara, there’s the mystery of what happened to Bronwyn, and there’s also the beautiful images Henry creates of the lovely Cumbrian setting. It’s where Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated her children’s books and it’s surrounded by mountains, and replete with lakes, pastures filled with fluffy sheep, and charming historic towns. We can almost breathe in the fresh, clean, crisp air under the deep blue skies. Ironically, it’s the setting Clara painted in the illustrations she created for a set of stories about Harriet the Hedgehog, for which she has won the prestigious Caldecott Award.
The writing, especially when describing the bucolic settings, is magnificent. “…ice crackled at the edge of a silver lake; geese flew in a V overhead, squawking their joy at the world; a naked hawthorn tree spread its gnarled arms above the land; and a wet flake of snow landed on my face.” I found it very poignant when Wynnie discusses the horror of Peter Rabbit when Mr. McGregor cooked his father. Henry points out that the world is a scary place, and “where is a better place to see it first than with Peter Rabbit?” Wynnie reflects that in that way, we also know there are good parts, too. Children learn about loss and death through stories and fairy tales.
While Henry revisits the usual themes: life, loss, sacrifice, forgiveness, and love, she does so with a story so compelling that we feel emotionally invested in the outcome. Just what will a mother sacrifice for her family? How much can we forgive of those who abandon us? How important are our stories, not only the stories that we write, but the stories that we make with the way we live our lives? And threaded through the pages is a subtle condemnation of the way we have looked at mental illness and treated those who suffered from it as well as those who just may have decided to live a life differently from the rest of us. All those questions would make for a fabulous book club discussion.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.