Description
For fifty years, Dugald Laird and Francesca Morrow have had the perfect marriage, united by romance and a common purpose. Together, they've held up the beacon of art, truth, poetry, classical learning and Greek myth in a tiny school on the edge of upper-class Toronto, devoting their lives to rescuing the outcast children of the well-to-do. But the cracks are finally starting to show.
The catalyst is a new girl at school, Cassie, an awkward loner with an eye for unpalatable truths. Swiftly recruited by fearless Vida of the wild orange hair, Cassie becomes the propulsive force behind the school's rebel girl gang. The other trouble zone is Dugald, who is increasingly haunted by the wife and children he abandoned without a second thought for the glorious Francesca.
Francesca enforces the school's annual pilgrimage to Greece, as if by rigidly adhering to the "way things have always been" she can stave off disaster. And there, in the bee-kissed glades and among the ancient stones, the world as they've known it ceases to exist. As Cassie whirls in flames, both the perfect marriage and the template of the school shatter in a burts of truth-telling that releases them all to their fates.