A Soft Place to Land

For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children. But on a vacation alone, the couple dies when the small plane they charter to fly them over the Grand Canyon crashes. Afterwards, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will.

Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters’ journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to eye-opening San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, anger, and jealousy. It seems as though the echoes of their parents’ deaths will never stop reverberating until another shocking accident rearranges everything once again.

“In her first book, White slyly exposed bigotry and classism by letting her characters speak for themselves. Here, too, she presents Ruthie warts-and-all—vulnerable, petty, inexplicably hot and cold toward Julia—her roller-coaster emotions sometimes infuriating, at other times all too human. However, “A Soft Place to Land” forgoes comic relief in favor of a more complex and layered portrait of a young woman.” – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution