Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Spanning decades, this New England love story explores the aftermath of tragedy and the boundaries of forgiveness. This is the kind of long-arc story that begins before our star-crossed lovers are born, as newly married Mr. and Mrs. Webb move to the faculty housing of the Priory, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. Mr. Webb is gentle and devout, his wife a 1960s feminist reconciling her faith with her place in the patriarchy, made the more visible at a boys’ school run by monks. When they have Lily, who dreams of saints, and Jane, a math prodigy who imagines the varieties of time, Mrs. Webb instills in them a fierce independence, a gift that outlives her. Her early death leaves Lily adrift and Jane permanently broken. In high school Lily meets an unnamed boy, whip-smart and destined to be a major league footballer. Their future is set until one night—black-out drinking, a misunderstanding, a push—ruins a whole set of lives. The teens scatter: beautiful and dangerous Jane goes to Yale, the boy to prison, and Lily to Smith, where she meets the ornithology professor who becomes her husband. Years pass, oceans separate them as the boy becomes a merchant marine, but nothing can disrupt their thoughts of one another, and Lily’s guilt that she is to blame for everything. A love story in the grand tradition, the novel also explores cosmology and naturalism as a form of worship and feminism as a path to self-worth. Occasionally the narrative voice veers into lecture, but all is absolved as we wait with our lovers, hoping time needn’t bend backwards for them to meet again. Thought-provoking, hopelessly romantic, a pinch of tragedy—just the kind of novel to get lost in. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.