Summary

At 27, Molly Snow is the youngest of three siblings. Feisty but hard-working, she has always been overshadowed by her older sister, Robin, an elite marathoner who is favored to shine at the upcoming Olympic trials. When Robin suffers a heart attack during a training run and fails to regain consciousness, her family is devastated.

As Molly's parents fold under the heartbreak and her brother retreats into the cool reserve that is threatening his marriage, Molly is the one left standing. By default, she is thrust into the role of family spokesperson, not only with friends and the media, but at Snow Hill, the family's hugely successful tree and plant nursery. More crucially, Molly becomes her sister's voice when Robin can' t speak for herself. In the process, she finds her own voice.

While My Sister Sleeps is more than a coming-of-age story. Taking place over six days, this novel explores a family in crisis, peeling away layers of relationships to expose one startling truth after another. Mother to daughter, sister to sister - it is a story of rising to a challenge and making hard decisions, then loving enough to let go.

Barbara's Comments

Think green. We hear the phrase all the time, but it resonates on a deeper level with me. Way back, when my kids were little and I was desperate to get out of the house and go somewhere soothing, I discovered a plant nursery. It was maybe twenty minutes from my home, but light years removed. Here, with my boys in a stroller, I spent hours all-told wandering up and down aisles of green plants, smelling damp earth, basking in filtered sun, inhaling moist, healthy air. This was my personal spa in the days before spas were in style.

I bought my share of houseplants and tried to recapture a bit of the serenity in my own home, but three young boys had a way of negating the effect. By the time they were in school and my days were more quiet, I was writing up a storm and not thinking about plants. But I never completely forgot that greenhouse escape.

I've recreated a bit of it in While My Sister Sleeps. Snow Hill is the family business, and though it covers acres of land and sells trees, shrubs, and all sorts of garden accessories, the pièce de resistance - Molly Snow's domain - is the greenhouse. Molly works here. She also escapes here, finding the same moments out of time under the fronds of lush ferns and palms that I did. My hope is that readers will enjoy the escape, too.