Legacy of Shadows

by Lillian Moats

ISBN: 0-9669576-0-1
LCCN: 98-96937
Category: Fictionalized Memoir
Published 1999
Price $18.00 / Hardcover / 192 pages

None of us is unaffected by the dreams and failures of our ancestors. In events played out before we are born, our stories have already begun.

Legacy of Shadows traces the lives of three women whose stories indelibly blend into one during the span of three generations. Powerful and poetic, the story evolved from the author’s exploration into the mysterious impact of family history on her own psychology. Set in motion by the death of a small child in 1904, the story moves from Lincolnshire, England, to Toronto, to New York, to Chicago. Yet the true setting remains the interior landscape. Revealing the private perceptions of a mother, daughter and granddaughter in turn, Moats adopts the format of the journal, rather than the novel, to explore the impact of unresolved emotion passed down within a family. Legacy of Shadows offers readers an intimate perspective from which to consider how we become the people we are.

“This book will hold its readers close and tight, will teach them its remarkable, affecting and important lesson: that experiences live and last over a family’s generations as memories that shape hearts and minds.”
Robert Coles, M.D., Research Psychiatrist, Harvard University Health Services. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Moral Life of Children

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