Life in Split Time

by Sarah Crosby

Beneath the surface of their comfortable, even mundane life, the Smiths are feeling the tectonic shifts that adolescence brings into any family. Sixteen year old Samantha and fourteen year old Micah grapple with typical struggles of connection and independence, heritage and individual identity. At first the teenagers and their dad, Alec, don’t register the seismic activity rumbling in eight year old foster child, Kelly Duluth; the whole foster care business is Mrs. Smith’s thing. For her part, Kelly struggles to adapt to her new family and school lives, using the sharp weapons that got her through living with no father and an alcoholic mother. She’s fended for herself for a long time, so why should she stop doing that now? Her mother’s working hard to turn her life around and get Kelly back, but so what? Kelly’s much too busy to worry about there are arguments to instigate at the dinner table, mean teachers to humiliate at school, and nosey social workers to outsmart in order to keep her secrets to herself. But in a world that suddenly packs up and shuts down against a virus, the Smith and Duluth families find themselves in a shared hellscape, in which volcanic eruptions of fear and hope, secrets and absurdities, evil and redemption must also be shared.

342 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2021