The North Star Symphony is a fractured coming-of-age memoir moving across two timelines-a writer excavating his youth in a small Midwestern city at the end of the twentieth century, then years later, searching for what a mysterious van might mean. His mother's dark manuscript surfaces in his own sentences, her language distorting memory, until the boundary between inherited trauma and lived experience dissolves. At its center: a brilliant young woman with Dakota roots, prophetic and skepti...