THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND features characters who have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions and life events. It's about women and creativity, living a life differently from those around us, and being ostracized for those choices. Patti Callahan Henry presents loss in many varieties: abandonment, death, divorce. In Henry's capable hands, the story of a daughter searching for her mother is beautiful, made even lovelier by the choice of two idyllic settings.

Clara Harrington is raised in South Carolina on the coast near Savannah. Her early days are spent fishing, searching for oysters, and playing imaginary games with her creative, clever, doting mother, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham. It's a perfect childhood until the night in 1927 when Bronwyn disappears.

Henry writes the story as almost a mystery since we don't know what happened to Bronwyn. While Clara has a life that she considers satisfactory in most regards, she constantly feels the loss of the parent with whom she had an incredibly close relationship for the first eight years of her life. And now, 25 years later, when her own daughter, Wynnie, is eight, she can't imagine what circumstances might have caused her mother to leave her. Clara, an art teacher and illustrator, lives with her father after her ex-husband lost their money and their home due to a gambling addiction.

"In Henry's capable hands, the story of a daughter searching for her mother is beautiful, made even lovelier by the choice of two idyllic settings.... While Henry revisits themes of life, loss, sacrifice, forgiveness and love, she does so with a story so compelling that we feel emotionally invested in the outcome."

Bronwyn was a child prodigy who wrote a bestselling children's novel at the age of eight. Her life after that was chaotic, but she met and finally settled down with Clara's father, and they lived together happily. Bronwyn's creativity was also a huge part of her life, and many thought she was strange because she wasn’t like the other straight-laced women in their small town. Interestingly, Bronwyn is based on a real character with the same initials who wrote a book at the age of eight, published it at 12, struggled to write another novel, and disappeared when she was a young woman. Henry imagines the pitfalls and tribulations that might cause a person to vanish.

On the other side of the channel in London, Charlie Jameson has been going through the belongings of his father, Callum, who has passed away. He finds a satchel with a handwritten dictionary of sorts in a strange language. In it is a letter stating that the contents be given to Clara Harrington. But the instructions stipulate that the satchel cannot be mailed to her; it must be delivered in person. So when Charlie reaches out to Clara, she isn't sure how she can leave her job and home to travel across the ocean to retrieve it.

Charlie's family is well off, and while he offers to send Clara a ticket, she insists on doing it herself. Her father has not remarried, and they mourn the decades-old loss of the woman they loved. Clara is desperate to find anything that might explain why her mother disappeared and hopes the mysterious letter and dictionary might shed some light on what happened. She empties her savings account, and she and Wynnie book passage on a ship that will take them to England.

As Clara and Wynnie arrive in London, the worst smog ever envelops the city. It's difficult to breathe in the thick, sooty air that was poisoned by what they call "Churchill's cheap coal." Wynnie has asthma, and the unhealthy air is dangerous for her. It is fascinating to learn about this, which is based on a real event that lasted for days. Charlie takes Clara and Wynnie to the family's country house in Cumbria where the air is clean, and Clara encounters strange links to her mother and their family.

Clara is thrilled to find that the papers in the satchel consist of a dictionary that Bronwyn wrote with the key to the language that she created over the course of her life. With this, Clara could translate the sequel to the book that her mother wrote and perhaps make enough money to buy a house for her and Wynnie. But on the way to the country house, they are robbed. The thief steals Clara's purse with her money and passports, and the satchel with the documents from Bronwyn. While they are able to rescue some of the pages, most of the work is lost.

Clara finds that the local theater group is putting on a stage adaptation of her mother’s book. As she and Charlie encounter more and more clues that seem to lead to Bronwyn, they wonder about the link between their families. There's romance as we witness the burgeoning relationship between Clara and Charlie; there's the mystery of what happened to Bronwyn; and there's the beautiful images that Henry creates of the lovely Cumbrian setting, which is where Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated her children's books. It’s surrounded by mountains and replete with lakes, pastures filled with fluffy sheep, and charming historic towns. We can almost breathe in the fresh, clean, crisp air under the deep blue skies. Ironically, this is the setting that Clara painted in the illustrations she created for a set of stories about Harriet the Hedgehog, for which she has won the prestigious Caldecott Award.

The writing, especially when describing the bucolic settings, is magnificent: "...ice crackled at the edge of a silver lake; geese flew in a V overhead, squawking their joy at the world; a naked hawthorn tree spread its gnarled arms above the land; and a wet flake of snow landed on my face." I found it very poignant when Wynnie discusses the horror of Peter Rabbit when Mr. McGregor cooked his father. Henry points out that the world is a scary place, and "where is a better place to see it first than with Peter Rabbit?"

While Henry revisits themes of life, loss, sacrifice, forgiveness and love, she does so with a story so compelling that we feel emotionally invested in the outcome. Just what will a mother sacrifice for her family? How much can we forgive of those who abandon us? How important are our stories, not only the ones we write, but the ones we make with how we live our lives? And threaded through the pages is a subtle condemnation of how we have looked at mental illness and treated those who suffered from it, as well as those who may have decided to live a life differently from the rest of us. All of those questions would make for a fabulous book club discussion.