The Atlas of Untold Stories

A cross-country road trip serves as the backdrop for a family’s reckoning in this tender contemporary from Brunsvold (The Divine Proverb of Streusel). When free-spirited Chloe Vance decides to leave her barista job to teach art at an elementary school in Prague, she knows she’s found her calling—just as she knows that her rigidly traditional mother, Edie, won’t see it that way. To warm Edie up to the idea, Chloe invites her on a cross-country road trip exploring sites from American literary history. Edie accepts on the condition that Chloe’s pragmatic older sister, Lauren, come along. Unbeknownst to Chloe, Lauren and Edie are both harboring secrets of their own: Lauren has been consumed by anxiety after a thoughtless mistake got her fired from her job, while Edie’s haunted by the recent death of her own emotionally distant mother. As their road trip reveals different sides to stories they thought they knew, it also allows the Vance women to imagine different sides to themselves—and, with the help of their faith, to repair their increasingly frayed relationships to one another. While the characters follow similar arcs, Brunsvold mostly overcomes that issue with expressive prose and a quietly stirring climax. Readers will be moved. (June)