End of August, a tenderly drawn family saga by first-time author Paige Dinneny, is rooted in the lives of three generations of strong, independent women.
Set in Indiana in the summer of 1979, the novel is narrated by deeply sensitive, 15-year-old Aurora Taylor. She and her restless, 31-year-old mother, Laine, have lived in 18 towns. Their roaming existence stems from Laine's tendency to fall in love easily and then cut-and-run for various reasons--"dead-end" jobs and a "revolving door of men." Aurora was a "mistake," birthed when Laine "was still a kid" herself. When the two learn that Aurora's grandmother has lost her husband--Laine's stepfather--Laine decides to attend the funeral and check on her mother, Katherine, a recovering alcoholic.
But what is intended as a short layover becomes a longer stay as Laine casts her wiles on a local, married mailman. She takes a job at a downtown diner, and the three women soon settle under the same roof in Monroe, a "blink-and-you-might-miss-it" small Midwestern town. Although Aurora's gran and her mom are "oil and water," that doesn't keep Aurora and Katherine from forging a deep bond, with the older woman discovering what a well-adjusted teenager Aurora has become despite her vagabond life. Gran, her house, and the small town become a refuge for Aurora, but Aurora fears that if her mother repeats history, they will be forced to uproot again.
Dinneny's emotionally evocative, multigenerational coming-of-age story shows how providence can pave a way through familial abandonment and addiction issues to build pathways to redemption. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines