Why Joan?

A young woman steps off a train into the rest of her life. Joan Darcy has just left the sheltered walls of a convent school, her diploma in hand and her mother's death still a fresh wound. Her father has remarried. The home she remembers has changed. As she moves through the compartments of the Pullman car, watching strangers and remembering her mother, Joan faces the disorienting truth that she is no longer a girl who belongs somewhere, but a woman who must find where she belongs. Wealth and social standing cast long shadows over her family's dynamics. Her father's new marriage introduces a stepmother whose presence complicates Joan's position in ways she never anticipated. This is a quiet novel about the devastating, exhilarating process of becoming yourself when everything that defined you has shifted.