Novel — Drafted — awaiting revisions
Grandpa Baumhatte is dead.
When Ro receives this stark, unsoftened text from her older sister, Myra, she doesn’t know how to feel. Ro hasn’t seen her grandfather, hasn’t heard from him, since she was twelve years old and spending what would turn out to be her last summer at the campground he both owned and lived on.
The summer that boy disappeared. The summer Myra and Mom had their falling out. The summer of the explosive argument between Mom and Grandpa Baumhatte, when they’d left Baumhatte Campground and never went back.
Mom cut Grandpa out of their lives back then, over 20 years ago, and before Ro and her siblings found out why, Mom died in a car accident only a few years later Now, as Grandpa Baumhatte’s only living relatives, it falls on the shoulders of Ro and her siblings to return to the campground and settle his estate.
Hoping to turn an unpleasant task into an opportunity for both quality family time and a potential life change (taking over the running of the campground and moving into Grandpa’s old house would free Ro from her miserable waitress job), Ro brings her wife and her teen son with her to Baumhatte Campground. Their arrival opens Ro up to a flood of half-forgotten memories and an aching nostalgia, paired with a growing desire—a growing need—to stay here in this beautiful forest forever now that she’s rediscovered it.
And something in the forest wants Ro—Grandpa Baumhatte’s family—to stay forever, too.
As the forest grows more alive around Ro, as her need for this place puts roots down inside her, Ro finds herself making excuses to wave away the increasingly strange and dangerous goings-on at Baumhatte Campground.
Until something in the woods extends too warm a welcome to her son.
To keep her son safe, Ro must learn the secrets that drove her family apart decades ago, the secrets that brought them all back to this place, and she must find a way to heal old hurts and pacify what moves through the forest surrounding Baumhatte Campground.