Picture a typical suburban city, 1972 … the Roe v. Wade decision is seven months away and an upper middle-class family is about to be slammed into varying degrees of lunacy. Mabel Jamieson, the youngest of four siblings, had an illegal abortion that left her maimed and unconscious. Though unknown to her at the time, Mabel’s older brother Jasper followed her and was able to deliver her cataleptic body safely home. Filled with rage and misinterpreted information, Jasper swears to avenge his sister’s wrong doing and spends years sifting his way through seemingly impossible implications until he finds the man responsible.

Flash forward to summer, 1987 … Jasper’s eleven year old daughter Caroline and her cousin Mitch find a small cross near the home where their fathers grew up; a cross that bears the date March 24, 1972, and carries with it a powerful silence. The children trade theories about its origin and let their discovery saturate their imaginations until a tragic accident devastates Caroline and rips all the joy from her heart.

The Caretakers a is not another story of good vs. evil, but one of devotion vs. obligation and protection vs. abandonment. Crafted from years of collecting family members’ real life accounts as well as my own cherished childhood memories, the storyline will tug at your very soul and petition your own beliefs. The narration takes the reader down a nonlinear path with character revelations at every turn: Mabel becomes a young woman and learns to cherish her own worth, Caroline realizes that life does go on and Jasper comes face-to-face with a truth that has haunted him for nearly fifteen years.

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