The story follows Sean, who, after a tumultuous summer romance with an older girl, resolves to enlist in the Marines. As he navigates the challenges of his senior year in high school, he grapples with the complexities of growing up, relationships, and his aspirations for the future.
"Will Caynes is seventeen years old when he gets his first kiss. And it's not with a girl, like he always imagined, but with his best friend Angus, one drunken night. Angus is gay, and that's cool, but Will isn't into guys. Even though he didn't exactly hate what went down that night. Then Will meets a cute sophomore named Brandy who he's totally attracted to. This should prove he's straight, but he keeps seeing Angus on the sly. He can't keep this up forever, but no matter who he chooses, someone will get hurt. Himself probably the most."-- Back cover
"How quickly everything in the world disintegrates. Everything but the loneliness of young women." So begins The Whitsun Daughters, a story of three girls in a small Midwestern town, narrated by the ghost of a young Irish immigrant who, over a century earlier, lived and loved on the same small patch of farmland the girls and their mothers now call home. Award-winning author Carrie Mesrobian weaves the story of the girls’ day-to-day struggles with the fractured and harrowing memories of their unseen observer. The threads of the tales are familiar: An arranged marriage. An impulsive proposal bitterly refused. Secret affairs. And pregnancies, both welcome and not. Each young woman fights her own lonely battle in the generations-long war of those who would no longer settle for haunting the margins of a world that wants to ignore them.