Out of Stone

Set in a small New Jersey town in 1920, Out of Stone tells the story of three neighbors whose lives become intertwined by the lasting effects of the late war and a terrible family tragedy: Bruce Minton, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, who lives alone in the house his great-grandfather built; Marion Blauvelt, a sculptor, whose fiancé was killed in the battle of the Somme; Suzanne Girard, a twelve-year-old girl whose family is troubled. The war memorial Marion is creating exemplifies the novel's main theme: "A war memorial should be not just to remember those who died or were wounded, but to show a way to go ahead. Wasn't that what they had all been trying to do—put the past in its place in the present and future, not forgotten but linked? And the past was not unchanging—didn't it change in our minds as we changed? How could she write that in stone? But she would write it in stone, stone that changed under light, with distance, with the person who looked at it."