Molly is a teenager in the mid 1950s, living in San Jose, California. She and her younger brother, Angus, adore their Uncle Stephen, their mother’s younger brother. The siblings notice a subtle strain between their mother, Elaine, and Stephen, which at first appears to be based on his belief that he’s performed a miracle on a sick child and on Elaine’s rejection of his Christian God. However, Molly is a budding writer with natural investigative instincts, so she’s been gathering clues about her mother’s hidden past.

The author intertwines Molly’s road to uncovering Elaine Fitzgerald’s secrets with an account of her life in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, soon after hers and Stephen’s mother, along with their baby sister, died. Their father has become a drunk, is hardly ever home and is unable to support them. Elaine is inherently protective of her baby brother and fortunately lands a job reading to the extremely wealthy father of May Gossley. The old man, Mr. Seward, has gone blind, but he has the uncanny knack of “seeing” everything that goes on in his mansion, where he lives with May, her husband and their son, Howie, who is a couple years older than Elaine. Mr. Seward quickly grasps how smart Elaine is and develops a soft spot for her. When he realizes that Elaine has a crush on his grandson, he warns her that she is better than him. Will Elaine take heed?

As McQuerry alternates between the tales of mother and daughter, expressing them in picturesque prose, she brings the relevance of the two time periods together seamlessly to a remarkable ending. Reflecting what is quoted on the front cover of this book, “Sometimes the most important story to discover is your own,’ Between Before & After is beautifully written.

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