The Books We Read When We're Small: A Novel

Some stories find us before we know we need them. Some keep us until love can bring us back.

The thing nobody tells you about surviving the end of the world is that afterward you have to go and be a grandmother — which is harder, and which she would not trade for the safety of any quieter life ever offered to a woman of her line.

She is older now. She wants that on the record at the top, the way she has wanted everything on the record her whole life: she got old. That is the victory. Two hundred years of women in her family did not get to, and she did. Her sons are grown — Diego an archivist, of course he is, the keeper grown up into the only job that was ever going to fit him. And there is a new littlest one in the family now, small enough to still believe the soft places are real, small enough to be exactly what the dark comes looking for.

To protect the youngest, the family will follow the oldest story all the way back — through the dark wood, past the Galumphs, down to the first mother who left the very first door open in 1719. Because the books we read when we're small are the ones that teach us how to walk out of the dark. And love, in this family, has always known the way home.

The radiant final book of the Pages We Leave Open trilogy closes the circle begun in Book One — a tender, triumphant novel about grandmothers and grandchildren, the origins of a two-hundred-year inheritance, and the stories that keep us and bring us back. For readers of Alice Hoffman, Isabel Allende, and Sarah Addison Allen.

Stories keep us. Love brings us back.