"A story of choices and events so intimate I felt I was part of it. The novel is wrenching, the emotions radiant, and it will leave readers transformed"
--Luanne Rice, author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners
"Joyce Maynard has outdone herself in this beautifully written story you'll find hard to put down and impossible to forget."
-- Elizabeth Berg, author of The Last Time I Saw You
Bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Labor Day, Joyce Maynard now brings us The Good Daughters, a spellbinding novel about friendship, family secrets, and the strange, unexpected twists of fate that shape our lives. The story of two women born the same day in the same hospital, but raised in vastly different emotional environments, The Good Daughters is another high note in Maynard's already distinguished writing career.
They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital--but Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson are different in nearly every way.
Ruth is an artist, a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life--the fifth daughter born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters, Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. From the 1950s to the present, the lives of the "birthday sisters" parallel and oddly intersect, as each struggles to find her place in a world in which she has never truly felt she belonged. Sharing little except a birth date--and a love for Dana's wild and beautiful older brother, Ray--two virtual strangers will travel alternate paths winding through first love, first sex, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and tragic loss...until both are forced to reevaluate themselves and each other when past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light.
