Who doesn’t love a story about a small-town girl who finds her way back home? Rachel, in her 50s, isn’t exactly a girl anymore. She’s been estranged from her mother, she’s divorced but very friendly with her ex-husband who’s gay, and she’s about to lose her DC reporter job. Her return to Maine throws her into a chaotic scene of reuniting briefly with her ex-boyfriend and learning how to get along with her sister. She pushes back against her now-married boyfriend, insisting he figure out his own life but not before she sleeps with him one last time. And she works on renovating the house she inherited from her mother and along the way, befriends a homeless man who helps. But then he somehow sets the place on fire, destroying it and killing himself. (That’s one way to take care of a character you don’t know what to do with.)

Her anger-filled, but well-off sister, resents that Rachel left her to take care of their mother. And her sister resents Rachel’s career and most of all, that she never understood the abuse she experienced at the hands of one of her mother’s boyfriends. Rachel works through these many sister issues and feels herself gradually getting pulled into the town she left behind.

A bizarre walk in the woods, where Rachel is thematically “lost in the wilderness,” ends happily when she finds her way back to the family camp and settles into small-town life once again. The walk felt a bit too long and obvious in this otherwise engaging story. Perfect for readers who enjoy the struggles shared by sisters as they lose their parents.