THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND Book Review

The Story She Left Behind¹ by Patti Callahan Henry, eBook, 348 pages

Synopsis from GoodReads: In 1927, in Bluffton, South Carolina, a famous American—former child prodigy author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham—disappears, abandoning her eight-year-old daughter and husband. She leaves behind a sequel to her children’s fantasy blockbuster about a young girl named Emjie who is caught between worlds. But the sequel is written in the author’s secret and untranslatable created language.

Now in 1952, Bronwyn’s lost words have been discovered in a private library in England by a man called Charlie Jameson. Bronwyn’s daughter, Clara Harrington, a children’s book illustrator and divorced mother of one, goes on a quest to England to retrieve the lost words of her mother, words she believes will translate the sequel and help her discover what happened and why her mother abandoned her. Clara takes along her own eight-year-old daughter, Winnie, who is precocious, funny, wise, and who has an imaginary friend, also called Emjie, after her lost grandmother’s novel.

But when Clara and Wynnie sail to England, they arrive during one of London’s greatest natural disasters—the Great Smog. Wynnie is a fragile child with asthma and the air is deadly. Charlie Jameson helps them escape London and make their way to his family’s country home in the Lake District, where the tale unfolds in the wild and glorious landscape of Esthwaite Water and the land of Beatrix Potter. It is there that the tangled roots that tie Charlie and Clara together will be revealed, and the fate—not only of Emjie, but of Bronwyn herself—will come to light.

BOOK REVIEW: The storyline of this book and the cover really drew me to this one. I feel absolutely horrible because I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley and was supposed to have it reviewed in March on or before release and life happened and it just kept getting pushed off. Here's the thing though. Even though it took me months to read this all the way through, I remember it enough to have thought that other books that have come out since then sound very much like this one. It is based loosely on a real woman named Barbara Newhall Follet. She was a child-prodigy author who wrote The House Without Windows¹ and at age 25, after an argument with her husband, she left her home and was never seen or heard from again.

We get the present of the story with Clara as an adult, a mother herself, and flashbacks to when Clara was the same age as her daughter before her mother left and disappeared from her life. What kind of had me scratching my head is that Clara is a teacher, artist, and illustrator. I know this is the 1950s but I still can't imagine that someone in Clara's position would have been able get passports, boat tickets, and plan for several days (I think it was supposed to be a week at most) in not just another country but on another continent. That's definitely thousands in today's money so you know it was expensive back then especially if they were spending days on a ship to cross the ocean instead of taking a plane.

This is a 4 star read for me. Here's the thing. I started this book late...like in May and it came out in March...and I just finished it in December. I enjoyed the story but not enough to finish it sooner. The characters are wonderful. I love the, for lack of a better word, adventures that Clara and her daughter have seeking out Clara's mother's words and trying to learn what happened to her. The relationships we see building and coming back to characters that I was hoping to see again and not just the little mention (no spoilers). I honestly do not know what could have been written differently to hold my attention more to finish it closer together. It is just that my overall feeling is that it's not the best story but it's really good and I liked it a lot!

4/5 Stars

2025 Reading Challenge: 69/50 complete

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