Pages We Leave Open: A Novel

Some doors are left open for the daughters who come after us. Some are left open as a warning.

By every measure her mother would have recognized, she has won: the four-bedroom house, the husband who smells like sawdust and Old Spice, two children who are alive and only occasionally trying to kill each other. She married up and out of the apartment over the laundromat — so why does she keep locking herself in the downstairs bathroom to finish just one more chapter?

Because the women in her family have always kept a secret folded into the pages. Some books are doors. And when eighty-one-year-old Tía Carmen calls the house to say it's starting — and you'd know what that means, so stop pretending you don't, a door that has been waiting two hundred years swings open at last.

What lives at the bottom of the worst book ever written is a thing made of every despair her family ever swallowed in silence — and it has been patient. To close the door, she will have to go down into the dark and do the one impossible thing no woman in her line has ever managed. The price of the door is the person she loves most.

Book One of the Pages We Leave Open trilogy is a luminous, fiercely funny, heart-cracking novel about mothers and daughters, the stories we inherit, and the light we leave on for the ones still to come. For readers of Alice Hoffman, Isabel Allende, and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

To remember is to resist. To write is to protect.