Marianne is teetering at the edge of reason. A death in the family sends her brilliant academic career and promising future spiraling out of control until resentment towards those who shaped her past leads her on a wild and desperate search for the truth about herself. On the seedy side of New York, she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing low-rent venues in a muddled bid to make his own dreams come true. In her new life, she finds anarchic squalor, home grown music and poetry, booze, drugs, sex, violence, love, loss, and, above all, exhilarating freedom on her troubled journey from sleep to awakening. This gritty, relentless story unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within.
Brief bio: Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of a poetry book Repulsion Thrust, a novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything, and a number of other poetry chapbooks including Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Blooming Red, Imagining the Future, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. Find out more at http://www.magdalenaball.com
