When eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her brother, Travis, are abandoned in a campground by their desperate mother and her boyfriend of the moment, they are left with only two things: a phone number written in Magic Marker on Travis's back and their mother's favorite housecoat, which she leaves wrapped around her sleeping children. This housecoat, painted with tiny fireflies, becomes totemic for Tessa Lee, providing a connection to her past and to the beautiful mother she lost.

Seven years later, when word arrives that her mother has been spotted working at a tourist trap on a seaside boardwalk not far from where Tessa Lee lives, she sets off on a dangerous journey to try to recover what has been taken from her.

Steeped in the rich Southern atmosphere for which Sheri Reynolds has long been hailed, Firefly Cloak is a vivid coming-of-age novel of family, loss, and redemption.

"Reynolds's The Rapture of Cannan was a list-topping Oprah pick in 1996. Ten years later, Reynolds's fourth novel gets going quickly by page five: alcoholic, drug-addicted single mom Sheila, taking up in Alabama with the latest in a string of ne'er-do-wells, deserts her two young children at a campground. Eight-year-old Tessa Lee awakes to find toddler Travis wandering around with a phone number magic-markered on his back and has only the shawl left by her mother, festooned with fireflies made of colorful thread, for comfort. Four pages and seven years later, Tessa Lee, who has been living with her grandparents, runs away to confront her mother, who has been sighted working as a mermaid at a Massachusetts boardwalk; she tells Sheila of Travis's death two years earlier and promptly loses her mother a second time. Ranging over the points of view of Tessa Lee, Sheila and distraught grandmother Lil, Reynolds flashes back periodically while the three try to eke out a present. Reynolds is frank in depicting Sheila's often reprehensible behavior and tender in portraying the warmth between Tessa Lee and Lil. The book never fully gels, but it is uplifting in its explorations of family, forgiveness and redemption. (Apr.) " Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Reynolds is in top form with these beautifully drawn, flawed characters. Fans of her previous novels will be drawn to her subtle, Southern lyricism, and teens will appreciate her perceptiveness in exploring damaged mother-daughter relationships." School Library Journal

"Reynolds develops her characters to a slow-simmered richness, finding gentle metaphors in the unassuming details of their lives." Booklist

"Reynolds is the newest and most exciting voice to emerge in contemporary Southern fiction." San Fransisco Bay Guardian

From the author of the #1 "New York Times" bestseller "The Rapture of Canaan" comes the haunting story of a young girl's journey to find the mother who abandoned her, set against the backdrop of the Deep South, with all its quirkiness and charm.

Sheri Reynolds teaches writing and literature at Old Dominion University. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah Book Club pick The Rapture of Canaan, as well as two other critically acclaimed novels, Bitterroot Landing and A Gracious Plenty.