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Carefully Designed Mask
The Pebble in the Pond follows a woman in personal and financial collapse who seeks a fresh start in a tight-knit Virginia town where she uncovers buried family secrets and entrenched social hierarchies. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The novel began as a short story for a flash-fiction challenge, and only featured Miriam and Louise. After sharing the story with an author friend, she suggested it could be a full-length novel, so I was off to the proverbial races. Like Miriam, many of us believe relocating to a new community will enable us to leave the past behind. But what if unknown elements of our past are meant to be discovered, despite the pain they may cause?
My master’s degree is in (American) History, and my focus was race, class, and gender in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather unwittingly, these themes found their way into my novel, which begins in 1978 – a time when the “norms” related to race, class, and gender were being challenged and re-imagined (but not without struggle). Then, as now, the tension between “tradition” and “progress” can be polarizing – that’s the backbone of this story.
The title suggests that small actions can have far-reaching consequences. When did that metaphor become central to the story?
My main character, Miriam Llewelyn, and her husband relocate to Stuarts Landing, Virginia, after sustaining financial ruin and personal loss. The move – her grandfather’s deathbed wish – was designed to represent a fresh start, yet Miriam was ill-prepared for the catty and, at times, vicious behavior she encountered from the town’s queen bee, Louise Winston Caldwell. Despite Louise’s repeated efforts to undermine Miriam, who took a job as a grocery store cashier while having the audacity to become a member of the Women’s Auxiliary, Miriam remained true to her core beliefs and character. Her integrity, authenticity, and kindness served as a mirror of sorts for the women in her orbit. Ultimately, she changes the town for the better…just by being herself.
The novel gives women space to be contradictory—generous, petty, controlling, vulnerable. Why was that complexity important to you?
Thank you for that! I’ve read far too many books in which women were treated as stereotypes – caricatures, even. Yet women are complex; what we reveal to the world is often a carefully designed mask hiding deep, painful truths that, if acknowledged and processed, can help us become better versions of ourselves. I’ve taken that journey myself and believe in the power of standing in our full authenticity, flaws and all.
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I am currently working on the prequel, tentatively called Playing With Fire, that begins in 1927. I expect to publish it next year.
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As Miriam settles in, befriending the eccentric, wealthy Webster sisters, she uncovers a decades-old family secret linking her late grandfather to the town’s most powerful household. A tragic fire, hidden adoption, and old betrayals surface, exposing rivalries that have simmered for generations. Miriam’s arrival sets in motion a chain of revelations that threatens to upend both the social order and long-held loyalties.
In a town built on tradition, Miriam must navigate ambition, jealousy, and hidden truths while finding her own place. Only by confronting the past—and choosing forgiveness—can she uncover the life her grandfather envisioned and forge her own path to belonging and peace.
The Pebble in the Pond
The Pebble in the Pond is a work of fiction, and it reads to me like Southern women’s fiction with a strong small-town family drama at its core. It follows Miriam Llewelyn, who arrives in Stuarts Landing, Virginia, after bankruptcy and grief have knocked her life off balance, only to find herself pulled into old local loyalties, class tensions, women’s power struggles, and the long shadow of her grandfather’s past. What begins as a story about starting over gradually opens into something larger: a novel about reputation, memory, belonging, and the way one person’s arrival can unsettle an entire community.
What stayed with me most was the book’s steady interest in women as they actually are, not as symbols. Author Suzanne Groves gives us Miriam, Louise, Emma, Bitsy, Pearl, and the Webster sisters with enough room to be difficult, wounded, funny, controlling, generous, petty, and surprisingly tender. I appreciated that. The writing has an easy, readable flow, and it often feels as if you are being quietly let into the social life of Stuarts Landing rather than formally introduced to it. I also liked how Groves builds tension through everyday moments: a church luncheon, a grocery store encounter, a tense conversation in a parlor. The drama comes from pride, history, and the thousand little ways people test one another. That felt true.
I was especially interested in the author’s choice to center class, status, and female friendship without sanding off the rough edges. Louise, in particular, is written with enough sharpness that she could have become a caricature, but she never quite does. That is one of the book’s strengths. Even when I found her maddening, I could still see the fear and conditioning underneath the polish. Miriam, on the other hand, gives the novel its moral warmth, though I think what makes her work is that she is not naive in a flimsy way. She absorbs a lot, she missteps, she keeps going. The title ends up feeling earned too. The book is interested in ripples, in the way old secrets and fresh acts of courage move outward through a town that pretends it cannot change.
By the end, I felt I had spent time somewhere real, with people I could argue about on the drive home. That is usually a good sign. I would recommend The Pebble in the Pond most strongly to readers who enjoy character-driven fiction, Southern-set novels, and stories about women navigating family history, social pressure, and reinvention. Anyone who likes novels where the emotional stakes matter more than speed, and where a town can feel almost as alive as the cast, will probably find a lot to appreciate here.
Pages: 420 | ASIN : B0GQCNB5VW
