True Colors

I picked up this novel because I had read two of Hannah later books about sisters and war, and I wanted to see how she handled a family story set entirely at home. True Colors came out in 2009 from St. Martin's Press and runs 393 pages in the hardcover, which felt about right for the amount of plot packed inside. It is set on the Washington coast, on a horse ranch called Water's Edge near a small town named Oyster Shores, and it follows three Grey sisters from their teens into middle age. I finished it in three sittings, annoyed at parts of it and moved by other parts, which seems to be the usual result with this writer.

The premise is direct. Their mother dies when the girls are still in school. Their father Henry Grey is a respected judge who cares deeply about standing in town and much less about comforting his daughters. The girls raise one another. Winona, the oldest, turns responsible early. Aurora keeps the peace. Vivi Ann, the youngest, can ride any horse and charm any room. Then two men enter their adult lives, Luke and Dallas, and the old closeness breaks under jealousy and loyalty claims that never quite heal.

Water's Edge after their mother is gone

The opening chapters stay in 1979 for a while, and those are among the best in the book. Hannah shows the ranch in practical detail. Fences to mend. Horses to feed. A yellow Formica table in the kitchen where the girls draw and argue. Their mother horse Clementine in the pasture. Their father selling that horse soon after the funeral because he cannot bear the sight of it, or because he wants cash, or because he wants control. The girls each read the sale differently, which tells you who they are.

Winona is fifteen and already bookish and heavy in a family that prizes outdoor ease. She notices everything. She keeps lists in her head of what needs doing. She loves her father and wants him to see her, and he mostly looks past her to Vivi Ann. Aurora is fourteen, thin and anxious, trying to keep meals calm and tempers low. Vivi Ann is twelve, grieving loudly, running to the barn when words fail. Hannah writes their nicknames and small habits with care. Pea and Bean and Sprout. Borrowed sweaters. Shared beds during storms.

Henry Grey dominates these pages without saying much. He is stern and quick to correct. He tells the girls to shape up. He worries about what neighbors will think. He does not sit with them while they cry. Later in the book Hannah gives him a few scenes that soften him slightly, but she never lets him off. His distance sets the pattern the sisters repeat. They compete for the little approval he offers, and Winona loses that contest early and keeps losing it for years.

A fair point to raise now is that Hannah stacks sympathy toward Winona from the start. The father prefers Vivi Ann. The town prefers Vivi Ann. Even Aurora leans toward Vivi Ann. Winona works harder and is liked less. This makes Winona easy to root for, but it also flattens Vivi Ann into a golden child for a long stretch. I wished the early chapters had let Vivi Ann be awkward or unkind in a way that made her fuller sooner. She gains depth later, though not always in ways I believed.

Luke and the first break

Luke has been Winona best friend since childhood. He is steady and local. Winona loves him quietly for years and assumes he will eventually see her as more than a friend. When he returns to Oyster Shores as a grown man, he does notice a Grey sister, but it is Vivi Ann. They marry young. Winona stands beside them at the wedding and smiles for photographs and feels split open.

Hannah handles this stretch with more restraint than I expected. She does not make Luke a villain. He is drawn to Vivi Ann warmth and ease around animals and people. Vivi Ann is drawn to being chosen so completely. Winona tells herself to be happy for them and mostly fails. Aurora tries to hold all three together with dinners and phone calls and careful seating plans. The ranch work continues. Foals are born. Bills arrive. Luke works nearby. Small resentments build over chores and money and who visits their father on Sundays.

The marriage between Luke and Vivi Ann does not hold. Vivi Ann feels restless in a life that looks settled from outside. She meets Dallas Raintree, a hired hand on the Grey property, and begins an affair that everyone in town soon knows about except Luke, or that Luke knows about and refuses to face. Winona learns the truth and tells Luke, believing she is protecting him and believing, less cleanly, that honesty will break the marriage and return Luke to her orbit. It does break the marriage. It does not return Luke to her.

I had mixed feelings about Winona choice here. On one hand Luke deserved to know. On the other hand Winona motives are tangled with old hunger. Hannah lets both truths sit side by side without resolving them, which is to her credit. The telling scene, where Winona sits across from Luke and forces out the facts, is painful because Luke hears the pity under the facts. He does not thank her. Vivi Ann does not forgive her for a long time. Aurora, who hates taking sides, starts avoiding long calls with both sisters.

Dallas Raintree and a life outside approval

Dallas arrives with a past that Oyster Shores will not let him forget. He has drifted between jobs and carries Native ancestry that marks him in a mostly white town quick to sort people into insiders and outsiders. He is good with horses and quiet around people he does not trust. Vivi Ann falls for him fast and hard, and for once the golden child stops thinking about pleasing her father.

Their life together is vivid in the middle chapters. They marry. They have a son named Noah. They take over much of the work at Water's Edge. Hannah writes farm labor well here. Mucking stalls in winter. Vet bills. A sick mare. A fence line that needs replacing before the rains. Vivi Ann, who once seemed to float through chores, proves tough and capable. Dallas proves loyal to her and to Noah, though he drinks too much when work dries up and picks fights when men in bars call him names he has heard since boyhood.

Henry Grey never accepts Dallas. He is cold at the wedding. He is colder after. He tells Vivi Ann she has thrown away her name. He tells Winona, who is building a solid career as a lawyer in town, that at least one daughter understands responsibility. These scenes made my jaw clench. Henry uses Winona hunger for praise as a tool, praising her only when she stands against her sister. Winona knows this and still leans toward the praise, which is human and sad.

Prejudice runs through these chapters without becoming a lecture. A shopkeeper watches Dallas too closely. A deputy stops his truck for small reasons. Neighbors assume Vivi Ann will leave him within a year. Hannah is clear that Dallas has made real mistakes, including a temper and a habit of shutting down instead of explaining himself. She is also clear that the town reads those mistakes as proof of character rather than as flaws a white local boy would be allowed to outgrow. That double standard later matters enormously when Dallas is accused of a serious crime.

If there is a weakness here, it is that Dallas stays slightly blurry. We learn what Vivi Ann sees in him and what the town holds against him, but his inner life comes mostly through Vivi Ann eyes. I wanted more scenes of him alone, working, thinking, afraid. Without them he sometimes functions as a test for the sisters rather than as a full person. Noah, even as a small boy, feels more concrete in these pages than Dallas does.

The charge and the refusal

The plot turns when Dallas is arrested for murder after a violent death in the community. The evidence includes testimony from an older neighbor named Myrtle, who says she saw Dallas near the scene, plus circumstantial details about his truck and his whereabouts that night. Dallas says he is innocent. Vivi Ann believes him. Aurora is frightened but loyal. Winona, now the best lawyer in town, is asked to defend him.

Winona refuses. She says she cannot take the case for professional reasons, citing conflict and history. Underneath, she is still raw about Luke and about years of feeling second to Vivi Ann. She also doubts Dallas, or tells herself she doubts the winnability of the case, which amounts to the same thing in practice. Another lawyer handles the first trial. Dallas is convicted. He goes to prison. Vivi Ann collapses inward.

These are the hardest chapters to read, and the strongest. Hannah shows what a trial does to a small town. Reporters park near the courthouse while old friends choose sides at the cafe, and the sisters stop appearing together. Vivi Ann drinks, misses school meetings for Noah, leaves horses unfed until Aurora steps in. Noah, now old enough to understand shame, acts out at school and at home. Henry Grey tells people his daughter made her bed. Aurora marriage strains because she pours her energy into Water's Edge and has little left for her own husband and children.

I believed Winona refusal as character truth even while I judged it. She has spent her life trying to be the good daughter in her father eyes, and defending Dallas would mean standing against her father openly, for her sister, with no guarantee of thanks. Hannah does not excuse her. Aurora says plainly that sisters show up. Vivi Ann stops calling. The silence between them lasts years, not weeks. When Winona later replays her reasons, the professional language sounds thin even to her.

A criticism is due about the legal material. The first trial moves quickly, with key testimony accepted a bit too smoothly and defense efforts sketched rather than shown. Hannah cares more about the family fallout than about procedure, which is fair for this kind of novel, but the conviction then rests heavily on one account without enough testing in front of us.

Noah and the slow way back

Noah becomes the heart of the second half. Fatherless while Dallas is inside and motherless in practice while Vivi Ann numbs herself, he drifts into skipping school and riding horses too fast. He loves his mother and resents her. Hannah writes his anger without making him a case study. He is rude to teachers he likes, then gentle with a foal and ashamed of being gentle.

Winona and Noah find each other by accident rather than by plan, through a school matter and files carried in from her car and talk about books. He asks blunt questions about why she would not help his father, and her careful answers satisfy neither of them. Slowly, through rides and chores and homework at her kitchen table, they build something separate from the old feud. Noah is the first person in years to see Winona without comparing her to Vivi Ann, and Winona stays steady for Noah in a way no other adult manages.

This bond pushes Winona to look again at the case file she once set aside. Transcripts, a prison visit with Dallas, and Aurora notes with dates no one else bothered to keep all pull her back in. She reinterviews Myrtle, whose certainty looks different years later, shaped by poor light and by expectation as much as by memory. Hannah handles the eyewitness issue with care. Myrtle is not painted as cruel. She is an older woman who saw something frightening and filled gaps the way people do, and whose gaps pointed toward the outsider because the town had already taught her where to point.

I will not lay out the final legal steps in full, since the book earns its surprises, but the direction is toward a second look rather than a sudden rescue. Winona takes on the work she once refused while Vivi Ann must decide whether she can stand beside Dallas after giving up on him, and Henry must face what his coldness helped set in motion.

The repair scenes work because they are slow. A shared meal that does not explode, and a fence fixed together. Noah learning to ask for help. Vivi Ann mucking a stall beside Winona without talking about the past. Hannah resists fixing everything. Some neighbors never change their minds about Dallas. Some damage between the sisters stays sore. Forgiveness here looks like practice rather than a single tearful scene, which felt true.

What holds and what wears thin

Hannah greatest strength in this book is the sister bond when it is concrete. She is excellent on the small mechanics of family. Who drives Noah to practice. Who pays the feed bill when money is short. Who calls their father and who lets it go to voice mail. The ranch itself feels lived in, with mud and vet visits and mares in foal and kitchens that smell of coffee and leather. When the sisters work side by side, the dialogue loosens and the old jokes return, and you understand what they lost.

The weaknesses are real too, and they cluster around scale. A murder charge plus a failed marriage plus a troubled teen plus a second trial effort all crowd inside one family. At times events pile faster than feeling can absorb. Vivi Ann collapse in particular covers a lot of ground quickly, moving from capable rancher to checked out parent in fewer scenes than that change needs. Aurora, for long stretches, exists mainly to ferry messages and hide her own marital pain, which gets named more than shown. Henry rarely moves beyond disapproval until late, so his late softening feels rushed.

The prose is plain and serviceable, with flashes of warmth around horses and water and light. Hannah favors short emotional sentences when a scene peaks, which can feel repetitive across 393 pages. She also leans on interior summaries where a scene might do more. I found myself wishing she had cut one courtroom detour and added two quiet chapters for Aurora and Dallas alone, to balance the attention Winona and Vivi Ann receive.

Still, the core holds. Winona wants to be seen and Vivi Ann wants to be free, while Noah needs a steady adult and Dallas needs judgment on facts rather than reputation. Hannah ties these needs together through work rather than speeches. Fix the fence. Show up for the boy. Read the file again. Tell the truth about Luke. The book argues, without preaching, that family is what you do after betrayal, not what you felt before it.

Readers who like Hannah for historical settings may find Oyster Shores smaller and less textured than her later canvases. Readers who like her for sister stories will find plenty to hold. I closed the book thinking less about the verdict than about Winona and Noah at the kitchen table, doing homework in silence. That image carries more weight than the plot mechanics around it, and I suspect it is the reason this novel has kept its audience since 2009.