The last one home

After more than thirty years, Gia Scarpino, a successful lawyer in San Francisco, is returning to the past, to the Pennsylvania coal town she escaped from after high school. Uncle Tony, the beloved padrino who raised and loved her with a ferocity that has protected her even to this day, lies dying, and Gia must now fulfill a long-held promise to be with him. But Tony isn't the only one who yearns to see her. Waiting, too, are the once-inseparable friends she left behind: Willie, the handsome Irish boy whose tantalizing kisses consumed her - now a man of the cloth devoted to God; Yozo, the class runt she saved from a sadistic nun - now a rich and successful entrepreneur to the surprise of everyone, mostly himself; Barbara, the girlfriend with whom she shared milk and cigarettes, secrets and dreams - now a troubled alcoholic caught in a dead marriage. When they first get together, it's as if they are teenagers again, wisecracking and raising hell as they did in tenth grade. But as the excitement of their reunion begins to fade, Gia sees that, while most things don't seem to have changed, both the town and her friends are different. Gia, too, isn't what she appears to be, for beneath her controlled, confident exterior is a bruised spirit scarred by heartbreak. To come together, Gia, Willie, Yozo, and Barbara must heal their wounds and confront the old rivalries, long-held resentments, promises broken, and dreams forsaken that have haunted them through the years.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.