Sweet Constance

Personal tragedy has hollowed Connie Sweet, leaving her with little more than her farm and the steadfast support of her neighbor Ellen, who arrives bearing groceries, gossip, and, eventually, a troubled nephew in need of purpose. For Connie, a recently retired high school teacher, Dylan becomes an unexpected project—someone to mentor as she sets him to work cataloging the environmental diversty of adjacent land slated to become another wealthy outsider’s organic vineyard.

To everyone’s surprise, Dylan is a born naturalist. His intricate, whimsical drawings rekindle Connie’s own dormant passion for the wilderness and heighten her anxiety over its fragility. When the initial logging devastates Dylan, something fierce awakens in Connie. The vineyard owner—wealthy, oblivious—cannot possibly understand what he’s destroying without seeing it through their eyes. What begins as Connie’s well-intentioned educational mission spirals into increasingly reckless acts of defiance. When her growing lawlessness endangers Dylan, she is forced to confront the truth that no one is ever truly independent.

Through Connie’s journey, Carlsen invites the reader into the majestic forests of the Pacific Northwest while exploring profound questions: What constitutes home and to whom does it belong? What obligations do we carry toward our neighbors—both human and wild? Ultimately, she reveals how inextricably we’re bound to the places we inhabit, rising and falling together in an unbreakable ecological and emotional web.