Synopses & Reviews
Meet Meredith Herman, a fourteen-year-old expert witness to the slow unraveling of her parents' marriage amid the lunacy of Los Angeles, 1978, a world of bell-bottoms, grapefruit diets, and plastic surgery. Meredith is a girl of a specific time and place tackling the universal challenges of boys, school, and parents. Her mother, Leigh, is a housewife suffering an excruciating and often hilarious midlife discontent, a malaise that leaves Meredith's father, Robert, genuinely baffled. As Leigh attempts to reinvent herself as a liberated lady complete with assertiveness-training classes and a dalliance with an exotic artist Robert runs for cover into a hasty second marriage. Through it all, Meredith and Leigh struggle in a combative mother-daughter relationship as wonderfully real as any in contemporary fiction.
Tanney's debut sparkles with pitch-perfect dialogue and an astonishingly accurate sense of place. This novel will take readers on ajourney of belly laughs and heartbreak. The Herman family's story will charm and captivate you long after you've turned the last page.
Review
"Tanney's first novel has the sharply focused, linear feel of a movie....Her disciplined creativity serves her well in this thoughtful coming-of-age story." Booklist
Review
"[A] solid, often impressive debut offering a keen look at mother-daughter relations." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Katherine Tanney's debut novel dazzles with wit and insight. It evokes a timeless quality." Kinky Friedman, author of The Mile High Club
Synopsis
This endearing coming-of-age story set in Los Angeles in the late 1970s introduces a fresh and complex teenage narrator, her outrageous but completely plausible Southern California family, and a captivating new voice in fiction.
About the Author
Katherine Tanney was raised in Los Angeles and attended the California Institute of the Arts, where she received her BFA. She was a nationally exhibited video artist and worked in the film industry before getting her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Tanney has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony, a Story Magazine Award finalist, and the recipient of various awards and grants for her work. She lives in Austin, Texas.