Carolina Lee

Carolina Lee is a girl of two worlds, born in the elegant halls of Paris to an American diplomat father, yet utterly seduced by the Southern soil she's never touched. Her father fills her childhood with rapturous tales of Guildford, the family estate, and Carolina absorbs these stories like gospel, building an entire identity around a place she knows only through his voice and her own burning imagination. When tragedy strikes and both parents die suddenly, the girl who dreamed of magnolias and moss must confront a harsher reality: the estate is slipping away, and she is utterly alone in the world. What follows is Carolina's fierce reckoning with grief, identity, and belonging. Raised French in speech but Southern in spirit, she must navigate the painful space between the girl she was raised to be and the woman her lineage demands she become. A new male character enters her life, offering both hope and complication, as Carolina fights not just for a roof over her head but for the preservation of everything her parents meant to her. The novel pulses with questions that still resonate: What do we owe the dead? Can we ever truly go home? And who are we when the stories we've built our lives upon begin to crumble?