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A CROOKED TREE by Una Mannion

A CROOKED TREE

by Una Mannion

Pub Date: Jan. 5th, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304984-0
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

In this debut novel set in rural Pennsylvania, a 15-year-old girl recounts the events of the summer of 1981, when the bonds of family and friendship are tested not only by inner tensions, but also by an outside threat in the form of a predatory stranger.

Libby Gallagher’s narrative begins at the start of the summer vacation with her widowed mother driving the family home at night near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “The six of us were in the car,” Libby notes. “Marie up front…Ellen between me and Thomas…and Beatrice lying in the wayback.” (Libby’s beloved father, an Irish immigrant, had already left the family before his death in 1980.) Libby’s mother is driving erratically and arguing with 12-year-old Ellen when she suddenly pulls over and orders her daughter out of the car. “I looked back. Ellen was facing away from us, looking down over the bridge, where columns of cars funneled along the turnpike.” Disaster seems imminent. And danger does indeed materialize. Ellen is lucky to make it home. But that is just the beginning, for Libby’s story is one of a family, not a crime. “That summer when I so desperately tried to reel us all in, I didn’t understand the forces spinning us apart,” she observes, and through her eyes we see that change happening as clearly as we see the hills of rural Pennsylvania described here with restrained lyricism.

Suspenseful, affecting, and disarmingly evocative of childhood and the not-so-distant era of the 1980s.