Valentine struggles to make ends meet with her little brother, battling the neglect and alcoholism of her mother, Theresa. When she arrives home to find her brother battered, she makes the decision to leave forever, but before she can escape her childhood in northern California, a phone call drags her back with news she never thought she’d be able to handle. Is it possible to break patterns that have been generations in the making? Valentine doesn’t know for sure, but won’t go down without trying.
As you leave Valentine in present day, twenty years earlier you’ll find Theresa, thirteen-years-old and pregnant, thrown out of a perfectly charmed life by her mother, Caroline. Theresa fights to navigate her new existence on the streets in a shelter for girls, keeping hope alive that someday she will return home to the life she has always known.
Twenty years before that, Caroline is a picture-perfect housewife, married to the chief of police, caring for three children, and detesting every moment of it. The lie that she lives is too big to conceal, and when the doorbell rings and she’s forced to stare it down on her own front step, the fate of Valentine and Theresa unfold. Nesting Dolls is a novel telling the stories of three generations of women within a family and how their choices, lies, loves, and journeys connect and influence each other.
