An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait.
A wonderfully satisfying debut novel ... Sanders doles out relevant information in a careful and controlled manner. There are four Lamb family ghosts ... What could seem an overly whimsical device works here, in part because these are such rich characters on their own, not idealized spirits but complicated people who lived ... Sanders keeps all the narrative plates spinning, story lines slowly converging on an ending that feels surprising yet inevitable, as all good endings do.
Woven through this story are enough characters and plotlines to fill several more novels, but Sanders handles the abundance of material with restraint ... Sometimes she dips quickly in and out of a time and place; other times she lingers, immersing us so fully in a setting or dynamic that I’d forget there were other eras and characters waiting for the spotlight ... Sanders’s narrative shifts gorgeously through time and place to reveal all that’s been passed down through generations of Lambs.
The dead in this novel are not all-knowing, nor are they unnamed ... It’s refreshing. The story told here is not ethereal or pedestaled. It’s grounded, planted firmly atop the soil, which allows Sanders’s questions to meet the reader with even more urgency ... Sanders’s debut novel sings, joining a choir of voices alongside Toni Morrison and August Wilson in conjuring memory with contemporary urgency ... Sanders urges her readers to return home, not because it is comfortable, but because there is something to be found in the clutter—something buried away in a box condemned to the attic or hidden among the pages of a photo album: something that might save us.
