Based on a true story. A girl who ran off with a carnival. Two daughters taken by the State. And forty years to find the way home.

Southern Iowa, 1923. Seventeen-year-old Gertie Gufftason runs off with Lorenzo, the barker for a traveling carnival passing through her small coal-mining town. She believes she's choosing a life of adventure, but what follows is poverty, a difficult marriage, and two little girls she tries to protect-until the day the State takes them away.

Nine years later, eight-year-old Nora and her little sister, Patsy, are living under the thumb of the cruel Mrs. Morris, matron of the Park Ridge School for Girls. Their mother was supposed to come for them, but week after week, she doesn't. Worse, Mrs. Morris has begun to hint that their mother is a fallen woman.

When Gertie finally reunites with her daughters, she expects a warm homecoming, but instead gets the cold shoulder from Nora, who has grown to love the Park Ridge and wants to stay. Reluctantly, Nora goes home anyway-determined to live a better life than her mother ever did.

It takes a lifetime, and one truth Gertie has never told anyone, for Nora to understand what her mother's choices really cost-and to forgive them.

Perfect for readers who love sweeping dual-timeline sagas, a mother and daughter estranged by circumstance and reunited by hard-won forgiveness, sisters who survive a girls' home together, a coming-of-age story set among women of the 1920s and '30s, and true stories told with compassion and grace.

Fans of Lisa Wingate's Before We Were Yours, Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, and Jean Grainger will find a story that stays with them long after the last page.