And the secret dreams that keep her going-visions of finishing high school, going to college in New York City, becoming a writer.Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. The mad welter of feelings Mattie has for handsome but dull Royal Loomis, who says he wants to marry her. The burden of raising her sisters while her father struggles over his brokeback farm.
She collects words, stores them up as a way of fending off the hard truths of her life, the truths that she can't write down in stories. Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true.
Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, this coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.
But in the dead woman's letters, Mattie again finds her voice, and a determination to live her own life. Yet when the drowned body of a young woman turns up at the hotel where Mattie works, all her words are useless. And the secret dreams that keep her going visions of finishing high school, going to college in New York City, becoming a writer.
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