Brief Shining

To Sally and Anne, Willow Dasset was a place of sun and poppy fields and haymaking, and Grandpa Ludbury striding across the farmyard to welcome them. Everything was perfect at Willow Dasset, except their parents. Meg and Henry brought all their tensions and resentments with them, and their pervading restlessness somehow damaged the enchantment of summer at the farm. As Sally, the elder, changed from a child into a young girl, she realized that the tension came from her mother. Meg was a Ludbury, with all the strangeness, the greeds and longings of that curious clan. But now Meg's jealousy and resentment was centred on her own daughter. Sally, reaching for a life of her own, knew that if she wanted any kind of happiness, she had to fight her mother any way she could. And one thing she never forgot was her grandmother--for Rebecca too had had to fight the Ludburys--and Rebecca had won.