Lost Book of Eleanor Dare

Alice Young is a young widow in the last days of World War II. She means to sell Evertell, her family's crumbling estate in Georgia, but is unexpectedly handed the deed instead. With her teenage daughter Penn, she goes back to a house she believed she had left behind.

Evertell carries a family legend Alice has tried to forget. Her ancestor Eleanor Dare sailed to the Roanoke colony in 1587 and vanished with every other settler, leaving only a stone inscription.

A Commonplace Book was said to hold the truth of what happened, and it was meant to pass from mother to daughter through the Dare women. Alice's mother died before the book reached her, and it has been lost since.

Penn's curiosity about the family's past starts to bring up what the house has kept buried. Alice has to face the sacrifices the women before her made, and weigh what she owes the daughters who follow.

The novel is told from three points of view: Eleanor, Alice and Penn. It joins the real mystery of the Lost Colony to a Southern family story that runs across generations, moving between the sixteenth-century voyage and the war-era household.