The Violets of March is Sarah Jio's debut novel. It has a few things in common with the next book that I'll review: both books are set on islands off the coast of Washington near Seattle and both books chronicle a woman's healing in the wake of infidelity and divorce. Sometimes it seems I read books with similarities in character names, settings or plot themes; it's not something that I try to do, it just happens randomly. So. This is what bothered me throughout the entire novel. The familial relationship between Emily, a struggling writer suffering chronic writer's block, and Bee, an eccentric, secretive octogenarian, is described early in the book as such: Bee is Emily's mother's aunt. Except pages later Bee is described as an only child, the sole heir of her parents. As a genealogist, I worried over this the whole book through because how is Bee Emily's great-aunt if Bee is an only child? It is never spelled out or specified that the rel...
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