Excerpt from Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She twists in the air and lands back in the pool, bobbing in the fractal-lit water, laughing and saying, "Did you see me, Mom? Did you see me jump?" Her sister claps and shouts, slaps the water with the heels of her hands, then climbs out of the pool for her own turn.

"Watch me, Mom!" she says, and launches herself into the air like a comet, her angular momentum vector glowing in visible lines, and she is grasping lovelorn rescue dogs like clouds, pulling them toward her heart, teaching them to be good, and just when she begins to love them, letting them go to a home she has chosen, this daughter who heals and is healed by Sirius the dog star, this heart of your heart, this woman with the easy laugh, who rotates midair and looks straight at you, and in her fall back to Earth you see the weight in her eyes, the practical shrug of her shoulder, the opening of the hand, the letting go. The woman becomes a child again.

They both come up from underwater, heaving in big breaths, and they bump heads and swim toward you for comfort. You rub their temples and kiss the bumps away, and when they shrug you off, one swims toward a broken engagement, a broken heart, a discarded gown, tear-swept eyes, situational depression, and the other to an ER gurney, fevers, chronic pain, Lyme disease, and you see, in a turn of their thin shoulders, that you will not be able to fix anything in their lives, that there will be no Band-Aid or mother's embrace for what they will one day endure. There is so little to control in life.

"Put your faces down in the water and then come up slowly. I want to take a picture," you say.

"You're crazy," they say.

"I know. Just do it." And they swim to the edge of the pool and obey. They feel the gravity of the moment, the gravitational pull toward you that they have recently begun to fight. They slide underwater, then emerge, eyes locked on the camera lens, rippled turquoise and sky-colored water pulling them back, the expectation of the future blanking their faces, infinity circling their gaze past yours, and as you click two simple photos, paper fossils that will one day remind you how they once walked the Earth, you realize you have taken everything for granted. Your time with them. Their brief speck of time as children, the soft faces that turn to you as if you are the sun, the fact that time seems to move so slowly when in fact it is whipping past you at one thousand miles per hour and why you haven't flown off into space is beyond your comprehension. They will never stay yours, for they weren't yours to begin with. One day they will leave you, shoot off into the sky, and take their place in a bigger constellation. And it's your job to let it go.

Let it go. Let it go.

It's gone.

Excerpted from Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies. Copyright © 2018 by Dawn Davies. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.