White Picket Fences: A Novel

By Susan Meissner

Description:

When her black sheep brother disappears, Amanda Janvier eagerly takes in her sixteen year-old niece Tally. The girl is practically an orphan: motherless, and living with a father who raises Tally wherever he lands– in a Buick, a pizza joint, a horse farm–and regularly takes off on wild schemes. Amanda envisions that she, her husband Neil, and their two teenagers can offer the girl stability and a shot at a “normal” life, even though their own storybook lives are about to crumble.Seventeen-year-old Chase Janvier hasn’t seen his cousin in years, and other than a vague curiosity about her strange life, he doesn’t expect her arrival will affect him much–or interfere with his growing, disturbing interest in a long-ago house fire that plagues his dreams unbeknownst to anyone else. Tally and Chase bond as they interview two Holocaust survivors for a sociology project, and become startlingly aware that the whole family is grappling with hidden secrets, with the echoes of the past, and with the realization that ignoring tragic situations won’t make them go away. Will Tally’s presence blow apart their carefully-constructed world, knocking down the illusion of the white picket fence and reveal a hidden past that could destroy them all–or can she help them find the truth without losing each other?

Book Takeaway:

A life of pretense is a life that will ultimately disappoint you. It’s okay to want the American dream, but the “white picket fence” life is an illusion. We live in a broken world. You have to deal with ugliness when it comes across your path. You can ignore it only so long. If sweep everything you don’t like under a rug, eventually you are going to trip over it.

Awards:

Why the author wrote this book:

A few years ago I was a court-appointed liaison for children, a county guardian ad litem, and my role was to be an advocate in the courtroom for children involved in truancy or protective custody situations. Sometimes I would visit with a child whose home seemed as chaotic as a Kansas twister. Conventional wisdom would call it a dysfunctional home. But nine times out of ten, the child somehow felt loved there, and even when they were in a foster situation, they always wanted to go home. This led me to suppose that just because a home looks flawed that doesn’t mean a child can’t feel at home there. Safe and comfortable there. And then I realized the opposite must also be true. Just because a home looks perfect, that doesn’t mean it is. That’s where the seed of this story came from.