This is a story of personal triumph, although it sort of sneaks up on you.

Nora Stuart is a successful physician living the dream in Boston. Or so it seems. We quickly learn life with her ER doc boyfriend isn’t great, and before we can dig into that problem, she gets hit by a van. New priorities.

As Nora wakes up in the ICU, she finds her boyfriend flirting with a resident. She breaks up with him and returns to her hometown in Maine to convalesce. The last time Nora returned to Scupper Island was fifteen years ago, when she graduated high school a few months early.

She’s estranged from her once-beloved younger sister. Her mother, a taciturn Mainah, hardly speaks to her, and the former hero of her high school class resents her for allegedly stealing a scholarship to Tufts from him. Against this backdrop, Nora struggles to recover from her physical injuries, to integrate socially with the people she once left behind, and to cope with the Big Bad Event that recently happened to her.

What works

The author’s clear prose goes down like a cool glass of water. Chatty and unpretentious, Higgins’s style keeps the pages turning.

Higgins uses a specific technique I’ll bookmark to experiment with in future projects. There are no fewer than nine major relationships (and several more minor ones) that face conflict and demand resolution. Two of those are love triangles, and three more are family-dynamic triangles. It sounds convoluted, but it’s not. The author neatly braids these conflicts together so they all serve the ultimate story line of Nora’s personal triumph over her troubled past.

With the singular exception of Gloria, all of the characters represent some relationship Nora had in the past. The past extends as little as a few months, or as long as her lifetime. As Nora returns home, she discovers people can’t forget the person she was and accept the person she is. The new identity she struggled for gets erased and redrawn using her historical template. Nora learns in the story how to coexist with her past without letting it define her present.

Transforming a past struggle

Nora’s key struggle is to come to terms with the Big Bad Event–her nickname for a vicious assault she suffered during a home invasion. Throughout the story, she flashes back to it; her fear taints her day-to-day living, causing her to anticipate danger where none exists.

Luke, Nora’s key antagonist, competed with her in high school for a prestigious scholarship. Earlier in their high school careers they were friends. However, as graduation approached and competition increased, Luke turned to bullying and mockery. Nora won the scholarship; Luke got high, crashed his car, and put his twin brother in a temporary coma. As a result, she struggles with guilt for years. When Nora returns to the island, she finds Luke dissipated and deeply resentful of her success. Perpetually drunk and barely able to hold down a job, he stalks and threatens Nora.

Luke makes a few weak attempts to intimidate her, but Nora brushes them off and moves ahead. At the end of the story, though, Luke attempts to kill Nora. Higgins makes Luke use physical tactics that echo Nora’s Big Bad Event, tying the two struggles together. However, this time Nora employs self-defense tactics and overcomes Luke. She subdues him and even administers first aid (she is a doctor…), until the authorities take him away.

I like this technique: twisting one struggle to resolve another. In one event, she conquers her traumatic recent history by reliving it and rewriting its ending, as well as her older historical guilt about Luke’s outcome. She appreciates he is responsible for his choices; she didn’t ruin his life, no matter what the townsfolk think. In this moment, she also rewrites a third aspect of her history. By staying to administer first aid, she refuses to run away from her old, problematic life. She stays and helps because she’s a new and confident person, able to coexist with this conflict without it overwhelming her. This is the resolution of Nora’s character arc.

Fiction writing lessons:

Make all characters serve the protagonist’s goal.

Complexity in a story doesn’t need to come from the language or style. Creating a complex character web in which every character, no matter how minor, serves the character’s overall goal (meaning the lesson the character learns, and by which she grows) adds remarkable complexity to a story, even when the language you use is clear and simple.

Twist one conflict to resolve another

By creating a climactic scene that echoes but doesn’t replicate a previous defining conflict, Higgins elegantly resolves multiple plot lines.