She Saw Me in the Water

Though she’s painfully aware of the cliché, Eleanor Miller agrees to move back into her parents’ house after having failed to make it in New York City as an artist. She returns to White Pine, a village in the Adirondacks where everyone, from the gallerists to the grocery store owner, has known her since infancy. Worse, they knew her perfect little sister, who shocked them all by drowning herself two years earlier.

To make ends meet, Ellie takes what her father would call “a real job” teaching art to middle schoolers. Between living in her childhood home and working at her old school, Ellie is surrounded by memories of the girl who was her everything. To avoid her parents’ awkward silences and her colleagues’ pitying glances, she spends more and more time with Dave, a recent transplant whose knowledge of the Miller family is limited to what Ellie tells him. As they get closer, however, her unwillingness to speak about her past drives a wedge between them, and her already shaky relationship with her parents reaches a breaking point. Unless she can figure out how to cope with her sister’s death, Ellie will live the rest of her life very much alone.