A Tapestry of Secrets

by Sarah Loudin Thomas Book 3 in the Appalachian Blessings series.

First published 2016

Amazon

4.6(322)

Perla Phillips, now in her eighties, decides that the secret she has carried since youth may help her granddaughter Ella abandon an impossible pursuit of perfection. A stroke prevents Perla from explaining, leaving Ella and her aunt Sadie to reconstruct a past whose consequences have shaped the Phillips family for six decades.

The investigation moves between contemporary Wise, West Virginia, and Perla’s young adulthood in the postwar Appalachian community introduced in the earlier novels. Family memory proves selective and silence can protect as well as wound. By bringing three generations of women into the same search, the novel closes Appalachian Blessings with a study of inherited shame, caregiving and the difficult difference between knowing a fact and understanding a life.