FernFolio

Twelve year-old Asia has lived with Ira and Maggy on their farm at Cold Creek for as long as she can remember. Abandoned by her mother at age three, she has found everything she needs in the elderly couple, their small house heated by its wood stove, and the fields of hay and sheep and cows. She loves helping Ira finish the beautiful wooden boxes he makes to sell at craft fairs and in gift shops, working with Maggie in her flower and vegetable garden, and climbing high in her old pine tree by the creek. She never thinks about the young mother who brought her to Cold Creek and then drove away one day, several months later, promising to return for her.
When Ira suffers a heartache and is hospitalized, Maggie and Ira’s son Harry comes home from California to help his parents. He tries to encourage his parents to return with him to California, where the warm climate will be easier on Ira’s heart and Maggie’s arthritis. Since he lives with his wife in an adults-only condominium, he begins to make alternative arrangements for Asia. Since they never tried to get legal custody of Asia, afraid that children’s aid would turn them down as suitable foster parents because of their age, Ira and Maggie have no rights with regard to the girl, and Asia quickly finds herself poised to lose the only home and family she has ever known.
But Asia is not the only one suffering the loss of everything she holds dear. Close to Ira and Maggie’s farm lies the abandoned ruin of a second farmhouse, the old Williams place. It is haunted by the ghost of Miranda Williams, a young wife and mother whose daughter, Daisy, died suddenly at the age of three, leaving Miranda bereft. Miranda’s ghost recalls the arrival at the Williams farm, nearly a hundred years before, of a man looking for work and accompanied by his young daughter, Beatrice. Miranda’s preoccupation with the child grows to be point of obsession and leads, eventually, to tragedy, one that has tied her ghost to the abandoned farm for over forty years.
The ghost of Miranda Williams reaches out to Asia, and asks for her help in locating something that has been lost for decades, something that will reveal a terrible secret and set her free. In aiding the ghost, Asia draws closer to her maternal grandmother, Beth, with whom she has gone to live, and finds within herself the courage to accept the changes that life has brought her.
Never to be Told is one of the novels nominated for the 2008 Silver Birch prize.
FernFolio Editor