For unrepentant suburbanite Ellie Walker – Florida-tanned, affluent and most damning of all, comfortable – chaos comes as an uninvited stranger right in the middle of life. When her son Danny suffers a near-fatal drug overdose, she faces a stark choice.
The easy option would be to let rehab take care of business. Keep up appearances. Instead, she plunges into the ritual darkness of shamanic energy healing. It’s about as far removed from the shimmering sunlight of the Florida Gulf as can be imagined.
While Danny recovers at a radical treatment center, The Sanctuary at Sedona, Ellie takes up a challenge issued by the center’s founder. The best way to help Danny, she’s told, is to tend to her own ancestral wounds.
Danny’s anguished cry for help exposes a fault-line of fractured relationships and family ghosts: a teenage pregnancy, a disturbing home life, a lost opportunity for peace. How do you reconcile with the dead? By passing through the veil.
Ellie witnesses her own inter-generational biography being laid bare through the otherwordly visions of sacred ceremony and is thrust on a journey to reconcile with those she didn’t realize she still loves. This is the work of healing a generation.
A moving examination of how the roles of wife, mother, daughter, and lover can be shaped by trauma, Secrets of a Suburban Gypsy will change the way you think about life in suburbia and what lies beneath its manicured veneer.
