Dicey's Song

Dicey Tillerman has already led her three younger siblings across two states to find their grandmother in Voigt's earlier novel Homecoming, and this sequel opens with that crisis technically over: Dicey, Sammy, Maybeth, and James now live on Gram Abigail's farm near Crisfield, Maryland. Settling in proves its own kind of hard. Dicey cannot stop acting like the parent she was forced to become, working a job at the local grocery store and resisting the new friendships in front of her, a schoolmate named Mina, a boy named Jeff, and a music teacher, Mr. Lingerle, all patiently offered and slowly accepted. Underneath the daily adjustment sits the family's real unfinished business: their mother, Liza, has been catatonic in a Boston psychiatric hospital since before the novel began, and Gram receives worrying letters about her condition all fall without saying much to the children.

In December the hospital reports that Liza is dying, and Dicey and Gram travel to Boston in time to be with her before she dies. The family cannot afford a traditional funeral, so they choose cremation, and a gift shop owner nearby gives Dicey a small hand carved wooden box to hold the ashes. Back home, the family buries that box together under a paper mulberry tree in the yard, a quiet ceremony that closes the year of grief the book has been carrying all along.

Voigt writes without sentimentality, and the novel earns its emotion through accumulated small scenes rather than a single dramatic turn, which makes it a patient read best appreciated by someone who already knows the Tillermans from Homecoming. A reader who wants a fast plot will find the pace slack in places; a reader willing to sit with a family working through real grief will find it exactly calibrated.