Book excerpt: Beauty & Grace is an intensely moving work of historical fiction that tells the stories of Teagan Cormick and Grace Reid, women from different worlds and different eras, brought together within the haunting confines of Midland's Wood Haven asylum.Teagan leads readers through her early life in Queenstown, County Cork, through to her youthful immigration to America and her chilling, involuntary commitment to Wood Haven following The Crash of 1929.Grace is a senior care consultant hired by Wood Haven in 1978, to deinstitutionalize their ten remaining patients trapped for decades within the asylum walls. Together, Teagan and Grace bond as they guide Wood Haven patients to new lives, while overcoming Midland citizens determined to prevent their presence in the community.