Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A luminous story about a fiercely lonely young woman's quest to uncover the truth behind her mother's disappearance. At six-years-old, Leah Fern is the carnival's Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller in the World -- taking strangers' hands and feeling the depths of their emotions. Her beloved mother, a beautiful, captivating magician, upends their life one day when, with little fanfare and no explanation, she leaves her daughter with an old friend and abruptly vanishes.
After fifteen years as a small-town outcast, Leah decides to end her life on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday. But the intricate death ritual she has devised is interrupted by a surprise knock on her door. Her mysterious neighbor, the curmudgeonly and reclusive art photographer Essie East, has died and left Leah a very strange inheritance. Through a series of letters, Essie will posthumously lead Leah on a journey to nine points on the map, spanning from South Carolina to Canada to the Arctic Circle--a journey that, the first note promises, will reveal the story of Leah's mother.
Driven by a ferocious resurgence of hope, Leah embarks on this bizarre treasure hunt, Essie's ashes in a jeweled urn in the passenger seat of her truck. Along her way, she visits islands, libraries, diners, and defunct ice cream parlors, meeting a charming cast of eccentric characters and immersing herself in wonders of the natural world.
An enchanting novel about the transcendent powers of the imagination, the magic at the threshold between past and present, and the courage it takes to love, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern explores the unlikely, at times adversarial, and ultimately redemptive relationship between a young woman who has forgotten how to live and a dead woman who summons her to remember.
Synopsis
A luminous story about a fiercely lonely young woman's quest to uncover the truth behind her mother's disappearance . . . When 6-year-old empath Leah Fern--once "The Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World"--is abandoned by her beautiful magician mother, she is consumed with longing for her mother's return.
Until something bizarre happens: On her 21st birthday Leah receives an inheritance from someone she doesn't even know, and finds herself launched on a journey of magical discovery. It's a voyage that will spiral across the United States, Canada, into the Arctic Circle and beyond--and help her make her own life whole by piecing together the mystery surrounding her mother's disapearance.
The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting novel about the transcendent power of the imagination, the magic at the threshold of past and present, and the will it takes to love.
Synopsis
an] imaginative debut...
- The New York Times
The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is a bittersweet and achingly tender coming of age novel. Like V. E. Schwab and Audrey Niffenegger, Rita Zoey Chin is an expert guide to that territory in which magic, loss, and possibility change not only the characters but the reader, too."
- Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble The luminous story of a fiercely lonely young woman's quest to uncover the truth behind her mother's disappearance . . . When 6-year-old empath Leah Fern--once "The Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World"--is abandoned by her beautiful magician mother, she is consumed with longing for her mother's return.
Until something bizarre happens: On her 21st birthday Leah receives an inheritance from someone she doesn't even know, and finds herself launched on a journey of magical discovery. It's a voyage that will spiral across the United States, Canada, into the Arctic Circle and beyond--and help her make her own life whole by piecing together the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance.
The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting novel about the transcendent power of the imagination, the magic at the threshold of past and present, and the will it takes to love.