NOVELS
Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name "Fred," is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred. But this is all before Mary Fred's whole world tilts irrevocably on its axis: before her brothers, Fred and Freddie, take sick and pass on to the place the Reverend Thigpen calls "the World Beyond"; before Mama and Papa are escorted from the Fredian Outpost in police vans; and Mary Fred herself is uprooted and placed in foster care with the Cullison family. It is here, at Alice Cullison's suburban home outside Washington, D.C., where everything really changes—for all parties involved. Mary Fred's new guardian, Alice, is a large-hearted librarian who, several years after her divorce, can't seem to shake her grief and loneliness. Meanwhile, Alice's daughter Heather, also known as Puffin, buries any hint of her own adolescent loneliness beneath an impenetrable armor of caustic sarcasm, studied apathy, and technicolor hair. And the enigmatic Uncle Roy is Alice's perennially jobless and intensely private brother. As Mary Fred struggles to adjust to the oddities of this alien world, from sordid daytime television and processed food to aromatherapy and gender-fluidity, she gradually begins to have an unmistakable influence on the lives of her housemates. But when a horrifying act of violence shakes the foundations of Mary Fred's fragile new family, she finds herself forced to confront, painfully, the very nature of the way she was raised.
Translated by Dorothée Zumstein. Originale, émouvante et drôle, l'histoire d'une jeune fille qui découvre le monde après avoir vécu dans une secte. Mary Fred, quinze ans, a grandi dans une communauté religieuse en pleine campagne de Virginie, complètement en marge de la société. Élevée comme ses sept frères et sœurs selon des principes très stricts, elle est toujours sobrement vêtue de marron et coiffée de tresses. Lorsque l'un de ses frères meurt par manque de soins médicaux, la police arrête ses parents, et Mary Fred est placée dans une famille d'accueil du côté de Washington. Là, auprès d'Alice, récemment divorcée, de sa fille Heather, quinze ans elle aussi, et en pleine crise d'adolescence, de l'oncle Roy, enfin, un marginal toxicomane, elle découvre un mode de vie et un langage qui lui donnent l'impression d'être une extraterrestre ! Mais la rencontre détonante entre ces deux mondes va provoquer autant de surprises et de changements que de bienfaits dans la vie de chacun, jusqu'à ce qu'un terrible événement bouleverse à nouveau le fragile équilibre de Mary Fred...
When slacker-chef Julie and her siblings begin clearing out their mother’s house after her death, her older sister Pam finds a cache of old letters from someone who appears to be their mother's former lover. It seems apparent that the letters' author was a Native American man named J. Fallingwater, and as Julieconsiders the dates stamped on the letters and her parents’ difficult relationship, she has a powerful realization: J. Fallingwater was her real father. Inspired by her new identity, Julie uses her small inheritance to open a restaurant named after her father. Falling Water is an immediate success, and for the first time in her life, Julie loves her work and has a sense of purpose. Although siblings Norma and Tim keep pressuring everyone to sell their mother's house, Pam and their other brother Ricky, a loveable drunk who has yet to learn responsibility, come together to help with the restaurant. But when tragedy strikes, Julie and her siblings are faced with challenges they never anticipated and the family’s secrets are revealed.
Artsy Rachel Cochrane returns from college to her hometown of Chicago in 1975 with no job, still reeling from the recent death of Bando, one of her best friends. When she runs into Joey, an acquaintance from her time as a waitress in a restaurant that was home to a drug ring, their late-night conversations propel them into their shared past and to a growing suspicion that Bando may have been murdered. Determined to find out the truth, Rachel is forced to revisit her stormy 1960s adolescence, a journey that brings her into contact with old friends and enemies, her old self, and danger.