Plain seeing

When Lucy was fifteen, her mother died. Everything that has followed - her education, husband, and child - has been "after the fact." Her perennial grief is compounded by a sense of never having really known her mother, who ran away to California, then came home pregnant at seventeen. Did she really love Lucy? Could she have struggled harder to live? Lucy has only the image of her mothers stepping down from a train into her own mother's arms, and her memories of an enigmatic, melancholy woman. How often she has thought, I wish there were more to know. More to tell. The reader does know more. "Emma Laura's Book," which opens with a family gathered for a portrait in a 1938 West Texas farm town, sweeps to wartime Hollywood and illuminates the myth of the vibrant young woman whose beauty might have made her a star. Nearly half a century later, in "Lucy's Book," her daughter is struggling to recover from a terrible injury when she realizes her family life is falling apart. Lucy's visit to her last older relative, her funny and feisty Aunt Opal in Lubbock, Texas, leads to the discovery of a second photograph taken that day in 1938. From there she embarks on a quest to understand her mother's young life, as a way to see the plain truth of her own. Only as she accepts the mystery of her mother's story can she begin to live a real and present life.