In this week’s book, The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh, Mom dies, right out of the gate.

The family lives in an old house in a wide-spot-in-the-road kind of town in West Virginia. Drafty as this old house is, they sometimes turn on the gas oven just to keep warm.

So, did Mom die accidentally because she sat in a closed-up kitchen, breathing poisonous fumes?

Or did Mom, who never could finish her novel, who weathered disappointments she could not bear, close up the kitchen, turn on the gas and bail on life?

Jazz and Olivia, her two coming-of-age daughters, remain behind to figure it all out.

Jazz is cold, hard and practical. Her younger sister, Olivia, always talks about chasing dreams and smelling hope. Olivia says things like “Stan’s voice had looked like pieces of cheese falling from a grater” or “I smell a chocolate morning.”

Is it any wonder these two clash?

This business of mixing up senses, “hearing” foods, “tasting” ideas and “smelling” colors is a thing, apparently. It’s called synesthesia.

A fellow writer I knew often employed this kind of imagery. Like a shopper loading his cart with one kind of cracker, he filled his stories with so much “I felt lavender” and “I saw the bird’s song” that we really needed to take his laptop away for a fortnight. Since I now know it’s a thing, I may have to repent of telling him, with my jaw clenched, to “just stop it” (except that I really do believe he was being an insufferable hack, and I suspect author Walsh of the same crime).

The two sisters embark on a quest to visit a cranberry bog, the setting of Mom’s unfinished novel, to see the “wisps” that hover above the water there.

Do I really have to tell you which sister believes this trip will lay their mother’s soul to rest and which sister thinks the whole safari is nothing but galloping after moonbeams?

Along the way, they meet bounty hunters and train-hopping hobos. These characters could be trusty guides, or they could be ax-murderers. Walsh keeps us guessing, which makes up the better part of the story. But you have to put up with all the grated-cheese voices and the improbable journey itself.

I inherited this book from a relative who frequents the free-books room at her library. I believe I got my money’s worth.

Photo credit: mharrsch via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA