Mary Christmas

In the golden light of a Maine village in the late 1890s, four Wescott children live their quiet, sheltered days until their father does something peculiar - carrying his collar and tie instead of wearing them to church. Then Mary Christmas arrives, and everything shifts. She is Armenian, traveling with a worn carpet and stories from a homeland she calls the Garden of Eden, a place of ancient trees and deeper history than these New England children can fathom. She is strange and beautiful and carries the weight of a world they have never imagined, one where empire crumbles and exile waits. The children are entranced. Their father, a pillars of small-town propriety, is unsettled. What unfolds is a gentle collision of worlds: the comfortable, certain life these children have known against Mary Christmas's past full of loss and longing, and the question of whether home is a place you come from or a place that finds you. Chase writes with luminous simplicity about the way one extraordinary person can crack open a child's world, letting light in where there was only the familiar.