River, Cross My Heart

Six-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of an apparently haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. In scenes alilve with emotional truth, the story weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents; the family's friends and relatives in their Georgetown neighborhood; and, most especially, Clara's twelve-year-old sister Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with her sister's death as she struggles to discover the kind of woman she will become.