I am a huge Joshilyn Jackson fan. Her novel, Backseat Saints, starts out with this line: "It was an airport gypsy who told me that I had to kill my husband." I mean, come on! How can you not want to read that?
After that book, I went back and read all her others. Then...nothing. I had to wait until this month for her newest - and probably her best so far - A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. Was it worth the the wait? Well, considering I pretty much cried my way through the last part of the book, and then ended up smiling through my tears, yeah, I would say so.
The strong, Southern women who people this book are raw and fierce, and they wear their love for each other like bold, brazen tattoos marching across each of their foreheads. We could all use someone like "Big" in our lives, and some of us probably know/knew a "Liza," and I bet a lot of us were a little bit like "Mosey," when we were young.
Go ahead and click on the above link for a plot summary but I'm going to leave you with a few lines from Big:
"So, the question was, would I let these corpse-cold bastards come after my granddaughter without a fight, without every bit of fight I ever had?...Standing outside that glass wall, I believed I had come to the awful end of everything. My family has long been familiar with that territory...That's when I understood that what I did today was a message. Even if I lost, if Mosey was being driven away from the only home she remembered in a sleek official car, it would absolutely matter. She'd be alone, afraid, and with good reason: she had to know, know down to the bone, that I had fought like hell. That I would always stand with her and fight like hell. That the second after that sleek car pulled away, I'd be in my Malibu, seeing where she landed, sitting outside. Law or no law, she was mine."
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