Wedding Ring

From Booklist
For Helen, Nancy, and Tessa, three generations of Henry women, quilts truly represent the fabric of their lives. Using scraps of feed sacks, wedding gowns, and baby clothes, matriarch Helen has chronicled her family in the hundreds of quilts she's made. Helen is now a recluse beset by an irrational paranoia that induces her to hoard everything she can, and her bizarre behavior motivates her daughter, Nancy, and granddaughter, Tessa, to spend their summer cleaning out their Shenandoah Valley homestead. For Tessa, the project is a way to avoid facing the tragedy of her young daughter's death, and the toll it is exacting on her marriage. For Nancy, returning to the house where she grew up forces her to confront the questionable circumstances of her own marriage and motherhood. Recalling her work as a volunteer in the Ozark Mountains, and acknowledging her roots in Virginia's pastoral Shenandoah Valley, Richards launches a trilogy of novels inspired by quilt makers, a series that will resonate with fans of family sagas. Richards pieces together each woman's story as artfully as a quilter creates a quilt, with equally satisfying results, and her characterizations are transcendent, endowed with warmth and compassion. Carol Haggas
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Now, with the gift of time, Tessa's eyes are opened, and she begins to see her mother and grandmother for the flawed but courageous women they are. As she restores a vintage wedding-ring quilt pieced by her grandmother and quilted by her mother, the secrets that have shadowed their lives unfold at last. And each woman discovers that sometimes you have to clean house to find the things you thought were lost forever.


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