One author's stories become larger than life in Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott (Burn). This sensitively rendered, well-balanced novel is told through four female points of view. At the heart is Harriet Wolf, a reclusive, revered author of six adventurous novels featuring two characters, Daisy and Weldon, who fall in love with each other as children; as the two age, from book to book, they are "separated by wars and disasters, by acts of God and calamities of the heart. When they finally reunite, they suffer." Harriet died before the seventh book was published, and enamored readers believe it would've revealed whether the entire series "was a tragedy or a love story, whether humanity is basically good or doomed."
Harriet's daughter, Eleanor--who has two adult daughters of her own--despises and resents her mother's success, having had to share Harriet with the world. When Eleanor suffers a mild heart attack, her own fractured nuclear family reunites. This includes Ruth--married to a Harriett Wolf scholar, but trying to lead a normal life while estranged from the family for 14 years--and Tilton, a shut-in, nursing a host of physical challenges and sheltered by Eleanor, who shared an intimate bond with her grandmother and made a pact with her regarding the rumored seventh book. With Eleanor ailing, is it time for Tilton to finally expose the mystery surrounding Harriet's last book?
With keen insight, Baggott offers an original, richly textured story infused with dark secrets, promises, loyalties, love stories and the psychological complexities of family dynamics across generations. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines