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With tender humor, brilliant insight, and an unmistakable narrative voice, National Book Award-winner Ellen Gilchrist returns to the celebrated Hand family and explores the world of complicated, simmering emotions, long the stuff of dreams and everlasting drama. A long, strange summer is about to begin. As tornadoes tear through America's heartland and the Soviet Union crumbles on television, Oliv... More

With tender humor, brilliant insight, and an unmistakable narrative voice, National Book Award-winner Ellen Gilchrist returns to the celebrated Hand family and explores the world of complicated, simmering emotions, long the stuff of dreams and everlasting drama. A long, strange summer is about to begin. As tornadoes tear through America's heartland and the Soviet Union crumbles on television, Olivia de Havilland Hand finishes her first year of college and returns home to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to explore the mystery of her identity and her Cherokee heritage. But even in a landscape steeped in memory, beneath the maple trees that fed her oxygen as a girl or on the gravel road where she first learned to drive, Olivia is surrounded by an all-too-present tangle of lives and loves: her strong-willed but fragile sister Jessie's travails with a new baby in New Orleans; her anthropology professor's stormy affair with a fellow academic; her aunt's blossoming relationship with a poet in Boston; her lonely father's fear of losing his daughters; and her own newfound romance with her old boyfriend, Bobby Tree. In this complicated web of relationships, spread across the country, connecting past with present, each struggles to find peace and, hopefully, love. The result is a masterful work of storytelling and a brilliant contemporary romantic comedy. Out of this maelstrom of misunderstood mates, screaming babies, politically correct lovers, estranged teenagers, and overprotective fathers comes a poignant, keenly observed meditation on love.

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