Title: Sister water
Description: With the same mischievous wit and the same gift for revealing the magical essence of the ordinary that captivated readers of her first novel, Things Invisible to See, Nancy Willard now gives us the sad, funny, inspiring story of a family in transition. Jessie Woolman first saw the angel of death when she was a girl. That was before she married Henry and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Henry had a scientific supply company and ran a small museum - a museum that harbored not only the natural and historical artifacts of the region but an indoor stream where fish could swim into view and then vanish under the floor. Now Henry is gone, and the museum is gathering dust, and Jessie's two grown daughters, while wondering how best to care for their mother - whose memory has begun to come and go with disconcerting whimsy - face crucial transitions of their own.

Into their lives come the healing presence of Sam Theopolis, a sometime waiter at the Buddha Uproar Cafe now hired to look after Jessie - and the disturbing presence of real estate developer Harvey Mack, who wants to buy the museum for a substantial sum and build a shopping mall on the site. And among them, too, come the mysterious creatures of the river on which Jessie lives - the river commonly known as the Huron, but in truth the one that joins the worlds of the living and the dead. How Jessie encounters once again the angel of death she first met so long ago; what happens when Sam and Harvey are, for vastly different reasons, drawn to one of her daughters; and how the river creatures ensure that justice is done when murder shakes the town are the elements of an enchanting tale that pulses with the heartbeat of family life and celebrates the redeeming power of love.
Subjects: Museums, Mothers and daughters, Fiction, Parent and adult child, Real estate developers, Older women, Mystics, Widows
Places: Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor (Mich.)