My second Hjorth, and it's the second novel about older woman's estrangement from her parents. Nothing as sinister as in Will and Testament this time around, but the focus on the maternal figure is present again...albeit stronger. This time the estrangement occurred in phases. Phase 1: our narrator left her husband for another man and moved to Utah to focus on her art. Phase 2: A retrospective of her art in her hometown featured artworks, Child and Mother 1 and 2, the details of which we are not told but apparently are disturbing enough to bring shame to her family and her mother in particular; Phase 3, after her father's illness and death, she does not show up for the funeral, deeply wounding her mother.

These three combine to create a total estrangement and resentment.

The bulk of the novel concerns our protagonist going back home after her second husband has passed away and her efforts to...I don't want to say reconcile, but maybe reconnect with or even understand her mother. We get snippets of her past that, honestly, don't seem too bad. She was a budding artist, her father didn't take it too seriously, her mother kind of did but was really under the father's thumb. The mother character was an interesting one, sort of jumpy, afraid of her husband, and , as it's revealed late in the book, a closet cutter/self-harmer. I don't know what our protagonist hoped to get our of demanding/forcing a confession from her mother about the self-harm, and I could see how her mother would see this as really harassing behavior. Their final confrontation built up dramatically and that scene was easily the best, most tension-filled in the book.

This is a great, domestic drama.