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“Deftly woven, complex and compelling… Memorable characters will hold the reader’s attention from beginning to end.”
New Novel Available
Our Orbit
In Our Orbit, nine-year-old Miriam Winslow has never worn new clothes, never had a haircut, and believes that sinners must repent with dramatic displays of remorse, or harm will come to their loved ones. Now thrust into foster care, Miriam must adapt to a secular lifestyle. Foster parents Rick and Deanne Fletcher quickly come to love their “new little girl.” Then, they meet the rest of Miriam’s clan: Uncle Dan believes he was abducted by aliens. Sister Rachelle, just out of juvenile detention, harbors painful secrets. Brother Josh is outraged that the Fletchers disrespect Christian teachings. He vows to take Miriam out of their home and put a stop to meddling in his family’s way of life.
A finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards for Best Fiction, Our Orbit captures the tension between modernity and tradition in the Appalachian corner of southern Ohio. It’s best described as “a literary novel that…reads at the pace of a thriller.”
“Our Orbit explores family and what it means to be one, or to be in one, for better and for worse. It explores the clash of customs and worldviews between traditional Appalachian and contemporary mainstream American culture. With deftness and skill, author Anesa Miller poses provocative questions about how we grow up along with or in spite of each other. Her narrative looks, without flinching, at the arbitrary nature of conflicting systems of authority and how these systems shape the individual life. We even get glimpses of the profound, the deeper Spirit that binds us, revealing our common humanity—all of this in a literary novel that never lapses into easy sentimentality and reads at the pace of a thriller.”
“Rejecting simplistic stereotypes, from “trashy” to “homophobic,”Miller invites readers to probe beyond immediate impressions. A compassionate, thoughtful narrative about hard-won self-realizations.”
I Never Do This
LaDene Faye Howell has spent her life in the small town of Devola, on an oxbow of the Muskingum River, in southeast Ohio. Her family is conservative and deeply religious, although another branch of the Howell clan are notorious criminals. When one of her outlaw relatives returns from prison, LaDene hopes the two of them may share an evening of fun, or even a spark of romance. Instead, Bobby Frank embroils her in kidnapping their old high school principal.
Told with country noir flair, the heart of the story is LaDene’s struggle to live as her own person while remaining true to her heritage and family loyalties.
“Haunting. Feels like an ultra-personal conversation. Grabs you immediately and refuses to let go.”
“LaDene’s voice propels us as she recounts her life of family dysfunction, religious fundamentalism, abuse, and how we can’t escape the darker impulses of family even when we think we’ve broken from them. …we witness how fast a life can unravel from a chance encounter. What I love is that the book starts with the confession of a crime, and suspense lies in how the heroine ended up there. For me, this makes it more compelling than the classic mystery or thriller. This suspense holds us to the end we thought we saw coming, but didn’t.”
To Boldly Go: Essays for the turning years
“These are provocative and eloquent essays, fierce meditations on our human capacities and frailties, the nature of memory, acts of forgiveness. Anesa Miller summons our better angels and makes firm reckonings with the devil, casting it away. A stunning collection.”
A Road Beyond Loss Three Cycles of Poems & an Epilogue
Product details
- Publisher : The Memorial Foundation for Lost
- Children (January 1, 1995)
- Paperback : 64 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0964764202
- ISBN-13 : 978-0964764200
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