Wren Wells had her future all planned out. After an internship with an art magazine at the end of her senior year of high school, she’d be off to Amherst in the fall, ready to make new friends and study both photography and medicine. But when an argument with her boyfriend ends with his death in a car accident, everything changes. Leaving behind an overprotective mother and a frustrated best friend, Wren goes to live with her artist father in the woods of Maine, where she spends her days sleeping, running or anything else that won't interfere with her desperate need to be empty and numb.
One day she meets Cal, who’s taking time off from college as he battles the same multiple sclerosis that killed his mother. Forming a new relationship, with new possibilities for hurt and anguish, is exactly what Wren doesn’t want. But Cal needs Wren as much as Wren needs Cal, and slowly—with the encouragement of the various students and artists who surround her father—Wren begins to reach outside herself again. At the same time, she starts to think about her future in new ways. Which parts of her plans were really what she wanted, and which were based only on her mother's expectations? How can she wish for love and connection, when she's seen where such wishes inevitably lead?
First-time novelist Amy McNamara wrote Lovely, Dark and Deep after the unexpected death of someone she loved. Her depictions of grief, depression and healing, set against a backdrop of the snow-covered Maine woods, make this a powerful book that's not to be missed.
