Boones Mill is the tiny Virginia town where Emma Valentine grew up after her parents died when she was five. Remembered through family loss, Kim’s care, and the narrow geography of childhood, it becomes both the ground of Emma’s early life and a measure of how far her imagination and later life will travel.

Emma’s Childhood in Boones Mill

Emma told Apollo that she had been raised in Boones Mill and had an older sister, Kim, eleven years her senior. After their parents died, Kim became Emma’s legal guardian when Kim turned eighteen. She found local work and raised Emma rather than immediately attending Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, where she had been accepted.

Emma remembered the years after her parents’ deaths through a small circuit: home, school, and the South County Library, twenty minutes away in Roanoke. The library was part of the world Kim helped make for her. Emma recalled that its librarian, Ms. Rook, helped raise her almost as much as Kim did.

The Library and a Larger World

At the library, Ms. Rook showed Emma films that opened a view beyond the town. Emma became captivated by a Portuguese-language film about slave uprisings in Brazil, though she kept its subject from Ms. Rook because she thought the librarian would be mortified. She loved the sound of Portuguese and persuaded Ms. Rook to order more Brazilian films, including Bye Bye Brasil, Subway to the Stars, and Os Trapalhões e o Rei do Futebol.

The library could not continue buying tapes for one girl’s enthusiasm, but the brief collection had already changed the scale of Emma’s imaginings. Through films and an unfamiliar language, Boones Mill ceased to seem like the whole world. Emma put the realization plainly: “I realized how big the world was. Bigger than Boones Mill. And I wanted to see it.” Her wish to travel began not in a dramatic escape from home, but in the library’s small, borrowed windows onto elsewhere.

A Measure of Distance

Years later, Boones Mill returned as a shorthand for the distance Emma had crossed. At a gathering with Apollo and Nichelle Murray, as the conversation turned to Emma and Apollo’s coming experience of natural childbirth, Apollo raised his glass and said, “Long way from Boones Mill.” Nichelle raised hers toward Emma and answered, “For both of us.” The toast made the town a point of origin shared in the moment with the people around Emma, rather than simply a place left behind.

The past associated with Boones Mill also helps explain the force of Kim’s later concern for her sister. After Emma had spent six months with little sleep and was visibly worn down, Kim connected Emma’s fear of losing her son to the loss of their parents when Emma was a baby. The novel gives no comparable account of the town’s physical landscape; its significance lies in this remembered childhood geography, the care Kim provided there, and the contrast between a small beginning and the wider life Emma wanted.