A lyrical coming-of-age tale where love, loss, and a whispered promise from the past shape one girl’s unforgettable journey toward healing and hope.

StarSong traces the extraordinary bond between a brilliant pediatric surgeon and her precocious ten-year-old daughter, Georgia. Set against the backdrop of a golden autumn in a small Southern town, the story opens with laughter, music, and a promise made at the kitchen table. When tragedy shatters the fragile beauty of ordinary life, Georgia must navigate the storm of grief and faith, science and memory, searching for meaning in a world suddenly rendered unfamiliar. With lyrical prose and piercing emotional insight, acclaimed author Patricia Skalka captures the ache of growing up too fast, and the enduring echoes of a mother’s love. StarSong is a tender, unforgettable meditation on joy, heartbreak, and the invisible ties that hold us together—even across the distance between life and death.

Few can do what Ray Glennon can. Many notice, hardly anyone understands. Ray has a secret. Three, actually. Sent away at birth, brought back nearly nine years later to a beleaguered country town called Faith. People stay in their lanes here, do as  they’re told, become what they’re expected to be. Ray is different, not an easy thing to be in Faith, making the poor kid a foreigner at home, a target of torment at school. An elderly couple offers solace and the delights within a ceramic jar on their kitchen counter.

As years pass, hardship visits many in Faith, and the community is repeatedly upended by a series of confounding incidents. It escapes no one’s attention that Ray figures in each. Notes written in a hand no one recognizes arrive from who knows where, curiously finding their way into Ray’s possession. Riddling out the cryptic messages brings Ray to the rescue of Faith’s most stricken and to terms with long-concealed truths and hard-to-grasp capabilities. Wonders ensue. A mother sacrifices body and soul. Secrets are revealed, as are faculties of the human spirit that only in the rarest instances get put to use.

Once again, Sara Rath has written a page-turner of a novel set in the present but brimming with historical authenticity. The star-crossed story of writer Jenny Burgess's summer in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, where she plans to research a century-old unsolved murder, links the rough and rowdy history of the region with the reality of sex trafficking today. Fast-paced, fluidly written, chock full of sharply drawn and loveable characters, salted with some dashes of mystery and romantic entanglement, Accidental Summer is fun to read while drawing our attention to a serious and persistent social problem.

—Alan Berolzheimer, managing editor Vermont Historical Society