The visibles : a novel / Sara Shepard

In the early 1990s, eighth grader Summer Davis cares for her father, Richard. Mentally fragile after a deadly accident during his own teen years, which was triggered by a terrible secret that he can't shake, Richard is destroyed when his wife abandons her family. A trip to Pennsylvania to stay with Richard's quirky Aunt Stella while they bury Richard's mother cracks open the doors to more family secrets and a chance encounter with a boy who makes a powerful impression. Over the years, Summer is left to manage the unmanageable. A brilliant, budding geneticist, she walks away from a once-in-a-lifetime fellowship, not to mention a life of her own, to care for her father until his downward spiral lands him in a sanitarium. Unable to abandon her caregiver role, Summer moves in with Stella, who's dying of cancer, thus bringing Summer full circle with the shards of her heritage and the dangling threads of ambition and thwarted romance. In piercingly beautiful language that tears the heart like shrapnel, Shepard shows us how summer is forced to come to grips with the knowledge that love just might not be a deadly weapon or fatal illness.