Sunday, February 18, 2018

What is Joanne Serling reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Joanne Serling, author of Good Neighbors: A Novel.

Her entry begins:
For most of my life, I’ve been a dedicated fiction reader, devouring novels at the rate of one per week with the occasional New Yorker story thrown in. But for the last six months, I’ve been on a nonfiction jag. It started with Boys of my Youth by Jo Ann Beard, a series of interconnected essays that read like short stories. Each one blew me away with their emotional depth and beauty. (And they were funny!) I then ...[read on]
About Good Neighbors, from the publisher:
A searing portrait of suburbia, friendship, and family strained by a devotion to false appearances.

In an idyllic suburb, four young families quickly form a neighborhood clique, their friendships based on little more than the ages of their children and a shared sense of camaraderie. When one of the couples, Paige and Gene Edwards, adopt a four-year-old girl from Russia, the group’s loyalty and morality is soon called into question. Are the Edwards unkind to their new daughter? Or is she a difficult child with hidden destructive tendencies?

As the seams of the group friendship slowly unravel, neighbor Nicole Westerhof finds herself drawn further into the life of the adopted girl, forcing Nicole to re-examine the deceptive nature of her own family ties, and her complicity in the events unfolding around her.
Visit Joanne Serling's website.

Writers Read: Joanne Serling.

--Marshal Zeringue