PATRICIA GROSSMAN 

When her mother dies in an accident, Mona Garvin is left alone with her father, an asphalt supplier with little impulse to imagine the experience of a young girl or attend to her impressions. Still, Mona's impressions survive and deepen—revealed with vividness and quiet intensity from within this grieving house.

 

"This tender, subtle first novella begins with its very adult, preadolescent narrator, Mona, imagining a device that would waft her to the bathroom each morning to `do away with the necessity of taking the first step out of bed.’ She embellishes her world through inventions to mute the pain of her mother Cass’s death in an accident, `a treacherous bend in the maze of the universe's order.’ "

—Publishers Weekly

 

"I haven't read such a poignant account of childhood and early adolescence since the days of J.D. Salinger and Carson McCullers. Ms. Grossman has written a beautiful tale." 

—James McConkey, author of Tree House Confessions