The Golden Hour - T. Greenwood

The Golden Hour by T. Greenwood


First Paragraph:

If this day were a painting, if I were asked to fill my palette with all the colors of that afternoon, you might be surprised by the ones I'd choose: grasshopper greens and cerulean blue.  It was June, I might argue, the last day of school.  Of course, the grass was green, the sky blue.
     But what color is thirteen?  Is it the cinder brown of wide eyes, the crimson flush of hot cheeks?  Maybe a dollop of peach for the chipped nail polish on ragged fingernails, that same fleshy pink for thin legs as they run across that endless green.  A cadmium shirt, and the washed-out cobalt of denim cutoff jeans.  Add blue to black for the hair, tied back, a horse's tail swooshing side to side like a pendulum with each stride.


My Thoughts:

T. Greenwood is another author that I've meant to read for a long time.  I'm glad I selected The Golden Hour to start my journey through her writings.  This is the tale of a damaged woman, Wyn, an artist, who tries to live her life and forget a terrible attack when she was a young teen.  She told part of the truth about that day, but not all of it.  Really not all of it.  And this has stunted her growth as an artist, as a wife, as a friend, as a mother.  When Wyn learns that evidence has been found that might set the man free who was convicted of her attack, she runs away to an island in Maine, to a house that her best friend owns.  There she finds many things, not the least of which is herself.  I liked this book very much and loved the descriptive quality of the writing - the colors, the setting.  I'll be trying other books by T. Greenwood soon.


Blurb:

On a spring afternoon long ago, thirteen-year-old Wyn Davies took a shortcut through the woods in her New Hampshire hometown and became a cautionary tale. Now, twenty years later, she lives in New York, on the opposite side of a duplex from her ex, with their four-year-old daughter shuttling between them. Wyn makes her living painting commissioned canvases of birch trees to match her clients’ furnishings. But the nagging sense that she has sold her artistic soul is soon eclipsed by a greater fear. Robby Rousseau, who has spent the past two decades in prison for a terrible crime against her, may be released based on new DNA evidence—unless Wyn breaks her silence about that afternoon.

To clear her head, refocus her painting, and escape an even more present threat, Wyn agrees to be temporary caretaker for a friend’s new property on a remote Maine island. The house has been empty for years, and in the basement Wyn discovers a box of film canisters labeled “Epitaphs and Prophecies.” Like time capsules, the photographs help her piece together the life of the house’s former owner, an artistic young mother, much like Wyn. But there is a mystery behind the images too, and unraveling it will force Wyn to finally confront what happened in those woods—and perhaps escape them at last.