Willa's Grove

Willa's Grove is a novel about four women and a single week set aside to ask what comes next. Willa Silvester has recently lost her husband and is trying to see a future for herself. She invites three friends to her Montana homestead, where they can learn from the natural world and from one another as they think about their second acts.

The invitation reaches three women in different parts of the country, who open their mailboxes to the same message: you are invited to the rest of your life. Their lives are quite different, but each has come to a similar, jarring crossroads. They expected to settle comfortably into middle age, and instead their carefully planned futures have led nowhere.

Willa is grieving her husband's untimely death and facing the fact that she must leave the small mountain town they founded together. One question keeps confronting her: so now what? Fiercely independent, she tries to answer it alone, then phones a childhood friend who is going through her own troubles. That call sparks the idea of a weeklong break from ordinary life, and they invite two more friends who are facing their own dilemmas. The four then gather at the homestead in the rugged wilderness of big sky country.