Three Story House: A Novel [Large Print]

Courtney Miller Santo follows up on the critical success of THE ROOTS OF THE OLIVE TREE with this story about family relationships, unrequited love and the secrets two women never imagined to find beneath the cluttered corners and peeling walls of their grandmother's oddly-shaped Memphis home. It's the almosts that haunt the Linwood cousins. Their childhoods were marked by early success-for Lizzie on the soccer field and for Isobel on the television screen. However, in adulthood they've each failed to become what everyone expected. The cousins' insecurities about being good, but not good enough, are compounded by the half-truths they've been told about their family and ancestral home, they call Spite House. Lizzie's near career-ending injury brings her home to Memphis and face-to-face with the almosts in her life. At the same time Isobel, avoiding her estranged mother and the unrelenting whisperings about her failure to become something more than almost famous, arrives to take care of their grandmother who has fallen ill. The cousins find Spite House, which sits on a bluff sixty feet above the Mississippi, is deteriorating nearly as rapidly as their grandmother. In the process of trying to save the house, their grandmother, and themselves, the cousins set off a chain of events that will almost destroy their families and the lives each of the women thought they wanted. Each step in the renovation reveals long held secrets in its dark corners and hidden spaces. Despite themselves, Lizzie and Isobel find themselves making peace with the almosts in their lives as they restore a house built out of spite.