Grace Holland

Grace Holland is a 23-year-old homemaker and Maine native who begins the novel in a place of naïve, dissatisfied acceptance of an uninspiring life. As she ferries her children about Hunts Beach, alternately visiting her best friend and mother, she grows increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage to a man who is at best emotionally distant and at worst abusive. Though she is intelligent and attractive, a graduate of a secretarial course with a slim waist and “thick brown hair that she cut short right after Tom was born,” Grace feels stuck in a rut that she cannot pull herself out of (6).

When the fire comes, everything changes for Grace, and while her path is not easy, she shows herself to be a woman with a greater amount of fortitude than she ever thought possible. She endures a miscarriage, the total destruction of her home, the diaspora...