I wavered between 3 and 4 stars and finally decided to split the difference and give this book 3-1/2 stars.

This story gets a solid four stars for being engaging and causing the reader to want to hurry to the end and bring meaning and closure to the mystery. A mother, Mary, has taken ill and lands in an ICU ward in a hospital in Vermont. Her youngest daughter, Nell, gets a phone call saying her mother is in the hospital and has named Nell as her health proxy. Nell assumes her mother is in a hospital in Massachusetts, where she lives, only to be shocked to find she is in Vermont. She leaves her two children in the care of her husband and rushes to Vermont only to find her mother nearly comatose and also discovers her mother wasn’t just visiting Vermont, she owns a cottage there. In fact, she has owned it for many years – even when Nell was a young girl. The older daughter, Bridgett, arrives soon carrying some heavy luggage – and not just the kind you pack in a suitcase. Both begin a journey to uncover the life of their mother they never knew.

The story line was interesting and, for the most part, well written, but it gets only three stars for presenting a scenario that this reader found a bit too unbelievable. Some secrets can be easily hid, other can be covered up enough that no one realizes what they are seeing, but owning a house for years and years with frequent visits and your husband and children never catch a whiff of it, stretched the boundaries a bit too far for me. There are just too many items involved in owning a home (taxes, insurance, repairs, utilities, etc.) that one spouse would be able to hide those expenses from the other spouse.

If you put aside the things I found difficult to swallow, it was still a moving story of the things a mother does for love, the sacrifices a mother makes and the importance of not losing yourself in the mix.