Based on a true story. A girl who ran off with a carnival. Two daughters taken by the State. And forty years to find the way home.

Southern Iowa, 1923. Seventeen-year-old Gertie Gufftason runs off with Lorenzo, the barker for a traveling carnival passing through her small coal-mining town. She believes she’s choosing a life of adventure, but what follows is poverty, a difficult marriage, and two little girls she tries to protect—until the day the State takes them away.

Nine years later, eight-year-old Nora and her little sister, Patsy, are living under the thumb of the cruel Mrs. Morris, matron of the Park Ridge School for Girls. Their mother was supposed to come for them, but week after week, she doesn’t. Worse, Mrs. Morris has begun to hint that their mother is a fallen woman.

When Gertie finally reunites with her daughters, she expects a warm homecoming, but instead gets the cold shoulder from Nora, who has grown to love the Park Ridge and wants to stay.  Reluctantly, she goes home anyway—determined to live a better life than her mother ever did.

It takes a lifetime, and one truth Gertie has never told anyone, for Nora to understand what her mother’s choices really cost—and to forgive them.

Perfect for readers who love sweeping mother-daughter sagas, sisters who survive a girls’ home together, women of the 1920s and ’30s fighting to reclaim what was taken from them, and true stories told with compassion and grace.

Fans of Jean Grainger and Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds will find a story that stays with them long after the last page.

★  “A compelling, poignant story. Michelle Cox writes flawed, fascinating women with understanding, compassion, and grace.”—Kate Quinn, New York Times best-selling author

★  “Cox offers a powerful saga that plunges into the complexity of family, love, forgiveness, and the cyclical nature of three-generational family dynamics.”—Booklife, Editor’s pick

★  “An addictive read!“—Kirkus Reviews

★  “A piercing historical novel about the gravitational pull that early memories exert on mothers and daughters.”—Foreword Reviews