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In 1927, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham simply disappears. She is last seen in a small boat off the coast of South Carolina, where she has lived for a decade with her husband and young daughter. Bronwyn has been living quietly in the area avoiding publicity; she’s famous for writing a bestseller when she was only 12 years old. What’s more, she invented a whole language herself to write the book, about the fairy world around us. There was supposed to be a sequel, but Bronwyn locked away the manuscript.
In 1952, Bronwyn’s daughter, Clara, is an illustrator and teacher raising her own daughter, Wynnie, in the house she grew up in. Years later, she still misses her mother and wishes she knew why she disappeared. When she receives a phone call from a stranger in London, telling her he has just found a dictionary of her mother’s language in his late father’s library, she’s skeptical but cautiously hopeful. Her mother had taken the handwritten dictionary with her when she left, and it’s presumed to be at the bottom of the ocean, just as her mother is presumed dead.
Clara takes Wynnie to London to learn more about the possibility Charlie Jameson has shared with her. She plans for it to be a short trip and an opportunity to show some of the city to her daughter, but then the Great Smog drives her out of London. Charlie takes her and Wynnie to his mother’s country home in the Lake District, and there Clara ends up finding out far more than she had expected.
The Story She Left Behind is a novel about family, about buried secrets and self-perception. It’s a mystery and romance. The settings are beautifully rendered; I felt such comfort easing into the lovely South Carolina scenery as well as the Lake District countryside. Because the character of Bronwyn was so enamored of the unseen world and left behind the idea of connecting to the fairies and nature, it informs the whole book and lends it an enchanted touch. I savored the story, the places, the people, the light mystery, and the romance.
An interesting note is that Henry based it on the true story of an author much like Fordham, whose disappearance was never solved. Here, she solves it for us in a satisfying way.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes about 10 uses of mild language and about 15 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes kissing and allusions to more, but any scenes are largely “closed-door.”
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
