My second novel, working title Jo, is underway!
In response to nudges and pleas from readers of my debut novel, Hardpan, the focus of the new book is on Jo Glover, wife of rancher Kurt Glover and mother of their four children, all of whom are introduced in Hardpan, published by Westerly Directions Press in 2015.
Logline: “After abandoning the failed Wyoming ranch in the late 1950s, a young mother’s dreams of landing upright in booming California get turned upside down.”
Development summary: Caught in a renewed cycle of poverty and hardship evoking her own mother’s experiences during the Great Depression, some twenty years later, Jo’s dreams of having a loving marital relationship and a financially secure future are threatened by her rancher husband’s inability to establish new roots for himself after losing their Wyoming ranch and relocating their young family to booming central California.
As Jo grapples with constant changes in domicile and jobs, and before feminism becomes the byword for the modern American woman, Jo finds herself the reluctant hero who discovers she must escape her traumatic past and create her own version of herself as wife and mother to attain her personal goals. It isn’t until the mid-1960s, when Jo’s two teenage daughters are on the cusp of going to college, that they mirror back to her that she is capable of doing anything she wants in life.