A year ago, Jade Engler's younger brother Benjamin was found beaten to death at the edge of their Paradise, Nebraska, farm. The event tore their family apart: the farm failed; Jade's father, despondent, has taken up with a sugary sweet younger woman; her mother ran off without a word.Jade herself responded by seducing any boy she thought might be responsible for her brother's death. Only recently had she begun to settle down-and now she's discovered she's pregnant. Jade is paralyzed by indecision yet terrified of staying in Paradise.And so, off she goes.From the first leg of her journey, where she works as an au pair to a rich Connecticut family, to a trip back to the Midwest and then onto San Francisco, which she romantically hopes will inspire her the way the same westward journey inspired her great-great-grandmother over a hundred years ago, Jade looks for answers. What she learns has more to do with the accidents along the way, as her mother might have told her: "How could one slip of a letter from Jane to Jade be so prophetic?"In one of Tricia Bauer's lyrical, heartfelt, even humorous novels, that's the way life goes.
Tricia Bauer was born and grew up in Baltimore. She began writing as a young girl and later studied poetry before turning to fiction writing. Tricia has written for newspapers and magazines, and held editorial and marketing jobs with different children's book publishers. Her stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies throughout the U.S., and her travel features have been published in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune.
Her first book, Working Women and Other Stories, was published in 1995 to critical acclaim. Boondocking was first published in hardcover in 1997, and was selected for the Discover Great New Writers program and named one of Library Journal's Best First Novels. Hollywood & Hardwood, her second novel, was published in the spring of 1999, and Shelterbelt followed in the fall of 2000.
Tricia was awarded the first annual FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize for her novel Father Flashes, which will be published in March 2011 by Fiction Collective Two, an imprint of University of Alabama Press.
She lives in Connecticut with her husband, playwright Bill Bozzone, and their daughter Lia.
www.triciabauer.com
