Drowning in Paper Flowers

There are two accounts of Ruby Powell's life running side by side.

The first is the one her neighbourhood in affluent Dallas gets. The house everyone admires. The doting mother who runs the PTA at her son's elementary school and the Booster Club for her daughter's soccer team. The husband who is still her best friend after eighteen years.

The second is the one she lives in. A house she has grown to despise. A husband whose affair has been going on a long time and is not a secret to her. A teenage daughter who loathes her. And a six-year-old son who is gentle and sweet and carrying the aftermath of being taken as a toddler.

E.L. Westbury builds the novel on the distance between those two accounts and on how much energy the first one costs to maintain. When something happens that Ruby cannot manage or explain away, the performance stops being sustainable, and what is underneath it turns out to go a great deal further back than her marriage.