Bad Girl Creek: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

From the critically acclaimed author the Los Angeles Times calls "one of the most gifted writers of the contemporary urban west" comes this national bestseller, a bittersweet novel about a circle of friends, women will take into their hearts. Phoebe DeThomas, thirty-eight and confined to a wheelchair, has always led life as a spectator, in awe of her beloved Aunt Sadie and overshadowed by her brother James, a financial wizard. But when Sadie dies and leaves Phoebe a flower farm, Phoebe's world begins to blossom for the first time. She takes in three women who have suffered losses of their own, a romantic break-up, a lost job, an eviction - and together they get the farm up and running. The bonds they form as they nurture the land gradually heal their hearts and help them make life-changing decisions. BAD GIRL CREEK is the tender, deeply moving story of their brief idyll. By exploring the women's strengths and needs and the complexities of families and friendships, Jo-Ann Mapson takes familiar themes and treats them with humour and sensitivity.

Reviews

USA Today A valentine to oceans of good women who survive bad beginnings and worse men.
Los Angeles Times Mapson [shows us] the world as we hope it is -- a world in which flawed people can be basically healthy, and even pain has a richness to it.
Anchorage Daily News "Hard is the heart that loveth naught in May" is a Chaucer quote in the journal kept by Phoebe's aunt. Same goes for the reader unmoved by Mapson's latest tale of redemption and pluck.
The Albany (New York) Times Union All too often in the nonfiction world, people find themselves isolated from friends in their youth. But in Bad Girl Creek, the characters create the world they want to live in -- a wonderful place to curl up in and read on.

Author Bio

Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of eight novels. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at the University of Alaska, and lives with her husband and four dogs in Anchorage, Alaska, where she is at work on a new novel. Visit her at www.joannmapson.com.