Augusta Cotton

by Margaret Erhart

"What was lost would be lost again every time we invented it, until the pearls of our lives were hidden under so many layers of story, that only through great effort and great love would we ever be able to bring them back." Told through the voice of Augusta Cotton as she recollects her childhood, this imaginative novel captures the magical and turbulent times of two eleven-year-old girls searching for meaning in the quiet confusion that surrounds them. It is the end of. 1963. Augusta's new friend, Helen Walsh, has mysterious and prolonged absences from school, and soon she is diagnosed with lupus. Augusta's father, the respected town doctor, has many answers, but he cannot make Helen well. Jordan, Helen's mother, is still shocked by the circumstances surrounding her husband's untimely death, circumstances in which Helen is somehow involved. The young girls spend more and more time together reading and telling the stories of their. Families. They grow closer as Augusta cares for her new