Beth Kephart writes astonishingly beautiful books for young readers. Picture books, middle grade novels, YA -- she has done (and been lauded for) it all. She also writes gorgeous nonfiction and memoir and has shepherded countless emerging memoirists -- through her books and workshops and classes -- urging them forward as they grapple with their past. She is a poet, a paper artist, a researcher, a teacher, and now, with Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News: A Philadelphia Story, she has her first novel for adults, and reader, it is a rare and lovely thing.
The novel is a story of a particular place and time -- Philadelphia in 1918. And it is the story of a particular woman who lived in that place and time, the story of Peggy Finley at the end of her life, looking back down the long corridor of her days. It is the story of the girl she was before that year and the person she would have to become after that year. And it is the story of Peggy's granddaughter, sitting by her bed and receiving her grandmother's story.
Kephart has explained that Peggy's story is inspired by, drawn from, the life of her own grandmother, and the girl? Well, that girl is a quiet marvel, a minor character but a major force. Peggy, from her sickbed, describes her running up the stairs, her stockings bunching at her ankles, the "confusion" of her senses turning ordinary moments into poetry, and the way "she loved the girl even more for the verse she'd be, open and broken and wanting." [4] Peggy has told this girl her stories over the years, but not all of them. The hardest ones she has kept for herself, the ones that started that winter of 1918.
The boy. All these years she has kept the news from her husband. All these years she has never mentioned Lani. All these years, she has hardly allowed for Harry and Sarah, and who will ever know who she once was, who she once loved, if she dies with all her secrets?
Peggy didn't tell her granddaughter those stories, but now somehow she has. Kephart plays brilliantly with point of view and time in this novel, moving effortlessly between past and present, allowing the author to be both a girl who never knew her grandmother's secrets and the only woman who can finally tell her stories. It is a kind of time travel, which is what story is, what story always does.
And then the story would go on, as she went on, carrying the girl back in time, to the middle of South Twenty-third, as she stands there practicing pitch-and-catch with Harry in the streets at dusk, roping Hannah in to race down the lost ball -- all until Ma hurries them in for supper.
It is a beautiful book, full of unexpected phrasings and word-turns that only Beth Kephart can create. Her gift with language is truly a thing to behold. But it isn't all or only beautiful words. Peggy's boy, the one she loved first, will be called into the war, called away from those Philadelphia streets. And Peggy's best friend Lani will be harmed by the fighting just as surely as if she'd been a soldier. And Peggy's heart will break. Readers' hearts will too.
In the actual world -- the painful kingdom of time and place -- dwell care and canker and fear.
Despite all that, despite knowing that time and that place will surely bring pain, I highly recommend Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News. It is a powerfully drawn story from a uniquely gifted artist.
