By the Sea, Across the Ocean, and Into the Woods—The Power of Place in Story

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome acclaimed novelist LYNNE GRIFFIN, debut novelist ELLEN HERRICK, and award-winning writer LENORE MYKA for a presentation of their books Girl Sent Away, The Sparrow Sisters, and King of the Gypsies: Stories. Each writer will discuss their chosen settings and how place acts as a vehicle for revealing character and plot, creating atmosphere, as well as increasing the tension and conflict in their stories. The authors will share how specific places serve as inspiration.

On Girl Sent Away:

Toby Sedgwick is terrified by his daughter's increasingly reckless behavior and takes a tough love approach, enrolling Ava in Mount Hope, a wilderness behavioral camp for troubled teens. Ava quickly realizes that the camp is little more than a prison, warehousing and abusing kids for their parents' money. And after spending a disturbing weekend completing the parent portion of treatment, Toby knows it too. 

As Ava desperately searches for a way out of Mount Hope, she is faced with resurfacing memories of a family tragedy—she can no longer suppress the pain of what happened to her mother and sister eight years earlier in Thailand. As father and daughter fight to get back to each other, the truth may irrevocably tear them apart.

On The Sparrow Sisters:

With echoes of the alchemy of Practical Magic, the lushness of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, and the darkly joyful wickedness of the Witches of Eastwick, Ellen Herrick’s debut novel spins an enchanting love story about a place where magic whispers just beneath the surface and almost anything is possible, if you aren’t afraid to listen.

The Sparrow Sisters are as tightly woven into the seaside New England town of Granite Point as the wild sweet peas that climb the stone walls along the harbor. Sorrel, Nettie and Patience are as colorful as the beach plums on the dunes and as mysterious as the fog that rolls into town at dusk.

Patience is the town healer and when a new doctor settles into Granite Point he brings with him a mystery so compelling that Patience is drawn to love him, even as she struggles to mend him. But when Patience Sparrow’s herbs and tinctures are believed to be implicated in a local tragedy, Granite Point is consumed by a long-buried fear—and its three hundred year old history resurfaces as a modern day witch-hunt threatens. The plants and flowers, fruit trees and high hedges begin to wither and die, and the entire town begins to fail; fishermen return to the harbor empty-handed, and blight descends on the old elms that line the lanes.

It seems as if Patience and her town are lost until the women of Granite Point band together to save the Sparrow. As they gather, drawing strength from each other, will they be able to turn the tide and return life to Granite Point?

The Sparrow Sisters is a beautiful, haunting, and thoroughly mesmerizing novel that will capture your imagination.

On King of the Gypsis: Stories:

Set against a wild and haunting landscape, the short fiction in this collection spotlight the struggles of everyday individuals to overcome the ghosts they have inherited from Romania's communist past. The book won BkMk's G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by PEN/Faulkner finalist Lorraine M. López, who writes, ''Myka's characters release uncountable fibers, connecting them to one another in the linked narratives, binding them to the harshly beguiling Romania they inhabit and that inhabits them.''