Little Ships

A mother dies unexpectedly, the father falls apart, and the grandmothers compete for guardianship of the two adolescent daughters, while everybody sorts out their lives.

After adolescent sisters Juni and Tilde Becker wake up one morning to find their mother dead, their grandmothers appear the very next day to scoop up the girls and their inconsolable father, Nick, and take them home to small-town Oregon. The women are full of loving resolve, but good intentions are small guns against the waves of adolescence and the young family's shocking history. Besides, the women, at ages sixty and seventy, are at their own crossroads. Across the months of spring, Nick reels from heartbreak and guilt; the sisters drift apart in the shoals of middle school; three marriages are tested; and the grandmothers seek new footing--in their own lives and with each other. There's no best way forward, but making-do offers the girls--who need it most--a path to the future; and the women discover they have surprising futures of their own yet to live.

Sandra J Scofield is the author of eight novels, a book of short stories, a chapbook, and two memoirs. Her book Beyond Deserving was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been on faculties of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University since their inception. Her Scene Book and The Last Draft are enduring craft books for fiction writers. She lives in Missoula, Montana in a multigenerational household. She is also a painter. www.sandrajscofield.com