What is Heather Young reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Heather Young, author of The Lost Girls: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I love multigenerational stories about families, especially when they explore the relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters. This year has offered a feast of them! Some of my favorites so far:

Modern Girls, by Jennifer S. Brown

This is a rich and often wrenching tale of two women living in the Jewish immigrant community of New York's lower East Side in 1935 whose unwanted pregnancies expose exactly how far they are from being "modern girls." Rose, the mother of five, is ready to leave childbearing behind and return to the political activism of her youth when she feels the familiar nausea once again. Her daughter Dottie, gifted with a head for numbers, has just been promoted to head bookkeeper when a single night of passion narrows her world in an instant. Modern Girls vividly realizes the crowded, striving conclave of New York’s Jewish immigrants in the 1930s, and never flinches in describing...[read on]

About The Lost Girls, from the publisher:

A stunning debut novel that examines the price of loyalty, the burden of regret, the meaning of salvation, and the sacrifices we make for those we love, told in the voices of two unforgettable women linked by a decades-old family mystery at a picturesque lake house.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family—her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child.

Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability—a way to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning. The house is cold and dilapidated. The dark, silent lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he’s telling.

Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.

Visit Heather Young's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Girls.

Writers Read: Heather Young.

--Marshal Zeringue