A Question Mark Is Half A Heart
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
How deeply can you love when your heart is full of secrets?
A sweeping, propulsive family story about a woman learning to love, from the bustle of New York’s fashion scene to a remote, windswept Swedish island, by the acclaimed author of The Red Address Book—“a love letter to the human heart” (Alyson Richman).
By age 50, Elin Boals has created for herself a perfect life: her wildly successful business as Manhattan’s preeminent fashion photographer is flourishing. Her handsome, patient husband is devoted to her; her teenaged daughter, Alice, has been accepted to the ballet academy of her dreams. But then Elin receives an innocuous looking envelope. Folded inside is a star-chart, with an address written by a familiar hand.
Shaken, Elin begins to have startling flashbacks, to a life very different from the childhood in a Paris bookstore that she has so lovingly recounted to Alice. In these images, a poverty-stricken little girl cares for her two ragged baby brothers, laughing with her family on the good days, sheltering them from her mother’s sadness and her father’s wrath on the bad days. Elin also remembers vivid walks with a young classmate, Fredrik, whose steadfast friendship and starlit confidences shaped her young life. As Elin becomes consumed by these memories, though, her New York life begins to crumble dramatically. Finally, her family’s troubling questions drive her to face, at last, the brutal secret from her past.
At once a heartwarming family story and a page-turning mystery, A Question Mark Is Half a Heart traces a surprising journey across continents to reconciliation, and toward finding a true sense of home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this tense outing, Lundberg (The Red Address Book) follows photographer Elin as she attempts to come to grips with the course of her life. Elin, her husband Sam, and her teenage daughter, Alice, live in luxury in Manhattan, but Elin's childhood in Sweden, where her family often didn't have enough money for milk, was a different story. Now, Elin is unsatisfied in her career, faces trouble with her marriage because Sam feels shut out by her, and is disconnected from her daughter. After receiving a star chart and a mysterious note in Swedish reading "On this day, a star was named Elin," Elin eventually determines the missive came from Fredrik, a friend from school. As the novel continues, Lundberg gradually reveals the complexity of Elin and Fredrik's bond and the entwined relationship of their families, as they become stepsiblings, and Elin's mysterious Google search for "Statute of limitations homicide Sweden" takes on startling connotation after a surprise plot twist. The author succeeds at painting a picture of Elin and Fredrik's intersecting families, as Elin grapples with the decisions she made for self-preservation. Readers will soak up the suspense as they search for the truth alongside Elin up until the end.