M Marie Lewis

Cottonwood Flowing M Marie Lewis

Seventeen-year-old Eva Kelly watches with anguish as her brothers are sent to fight in World War II. Caught up in the rigors of life on the home front, she finds her life changing even further when her hometown becomes refuge for some two hundred enemy prisoners. Sixty years later, Claire Beaudine returns to the place where she was raised. As her grandmother Eva lies unresponsive in a hospital bed, Claire finds, locked away in an old trunk, the journals of a young girl, coming of age in the turbulent 1940s. Claire, reading the pages, faces turmoil of her own. Returning home puts her in close proximity to the boy she knew and lost many years ago. While reading the journal, Claire learns of love, loss, and betrayal and seeks her own path to redemption. Interwoven between Eva's journals and Claire's memories are the stories of young men sent to war, the loved ones they left behind, and secrets that have been locked away for six decades.