Forty-four-year-old Willow Trudeau has lost her mojo, her career as an artist in New York City is floundering, and she decides to pick up and move to the small town of Weeping Willow, Ohio (for which she is named) where her father, Leon Ziemny, still lives. When she arrives, she's surprised to find that he has a houseguest, a stranger from her late grandmother's past, who is on a mission to find his murdered pastor brother's long-missing Bible, a treasured family heirloom passed down from slave times. Not only that, but he has a highly unorthodox request-a request that stirs up a hornet's nest of dark secrets about the Trudeaus.
Amid the cultural uncertainties of 2017 America, as the town gets wind of the newcomer and his reason for being there, it becomes a cauldron of volatile emotions and fears-from those of a pining waitress at the local diner, to the passionate worshippers of a controversial megachurch. And then the unthinkable happens and tragedy strikes, forcing Willow and her family to exhume the ghosts of their murky pasts in more ways than one.
The Fireweed Moon
, a contemporary literary saga of three generations of the Trudeau-Ziemny families, comes to a searing and poignant conclusion, addressing several universal themes along the way.
Among them, what moves good people to do bad things? How does trauma echo through time and affect successive generations? What is the nature of forgiveness? What does it really mean to love too much?