Book Review: One Beautiful Year of Normal

By Sara Steven

When August Caine receives a phone call from a Savannah attorney, she is blindsided by the news—her Aunt Helen has passed away. But how can that be, when August’s mother insisted Helen died in a car accident fifteen years ago? Determined to uncover the truth, August returns to the deep South, where the ghosts of her past—both real and imagined—await her.

Plagued by a memory splintered by her father’s unsolved murder when she was a child and further tangled by psychiatric treatments for the debilitating depression she struggles with, August realizes her survival depends on unraveling the mystery surrounding her father’s death. This means returning to the one safe place she remembers from the childhood she has mostly locked away inside her Aunt Helen’s home, and the ghost tours they created together. 

A chilling exploration of mental illness, mother-daughter bonds, and generational secrets, One Beautiful Year of Normal follows August as she pieces together the long-buried truths that shaped her family’s tragic past and confronts the question that has haunted her for Can the truth set her free, or will it unravel everything she thought she knew? (Synopsis courtesy of Goodreads.)

It sounds a little cliche, but what a story! It’s the first expression that comes to mind for me when I reflect on my experience with One Beautiful Year of Normal. August is working through a lot of past trauma and familial strife–so much so, she’s opted to do as much as possible to distance herself from her former life. She’s done a great job of it for a long time, until she’s contacted in regards to her aunt’s death. As much as she’s in shock over a death that was meant to happen fifteen years prior, it also set the tone for me while reading about her experiences. I knew going in that there would be more conspiracy theories, hidden lies, and untold truths that would be divulged as chapters went on.

What August goes through in her childhood is downright scary. Aunt Helen becomes a lifeline for her, albeit a brief one, with jumps back into August’s childhood and experiences with Helen, then fast forwarding to the present time, a front row seat into the fallout of Helen’s death. The reader gets the sense that before Helen, there was no normalcy for a young girl who becomes her mother’s caregiver, moving from one place, state, and at times, countries in order for August and her mother to “stay safe.” With Helen, whenever we see the flashbacks, we see a tween who settles into the roots of her world. Into learning more about a father she doesn’t remember as well as she’d like to. Into making new friends that might possibly become future foundations for her. 

A year goes by awfully fast, as August soon realizes. There are a lot of unanswered questions and even more confusion when she learns more about her aunt and various scenarios she’d been unaware of in childhood, but had an inkling to all those years ago. Maybe there is a lot more to the fears her mother had. I appreciated how the flashback chapters made me feel like I learned more about a girl who had grown up way ahead of her years, to the woman in the present who in some ways is very much still tied to that girl and hasn’t escaped the past. It made me think of how so many of us are still dictated by our own pasts and childhoods, the way we were brought up, the family relationships we had, whether for the better or for the worse.

There were a lot of twists and turns–some I could anticipate, some that were downright shocking. I don’t know that August will ever fully “get over” what she’s experienced, but it was nice to see the transitions and changes she goes through in the process of delving into the truth. One Beautiful Year of Normal was anything but ordinary. It was an extraordinary five-star experience!

Thanks to BookSparks for the book in exchange for an honest review.

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