Imagine the dying mother you’ve worked hard to love. Imagine further the same mother who plays favorites, never forgives and swells with resentment over her own lost life. Three daughters, three extraordinarily different lives are called into obligatory reunion in the family home as prelude to the mother’s impending death. A 90,000 word women's novel set in the 1990’s in California’s Central Valley, themes of jealousy, deception and unlived life dominate About the Carleton Sisters.
The novel opens inside Diego’s Diner on Highway 99 where Lorraine, the eldest, works as head waitress, at the same time attempting to convert the truckers and regional farmers to her fundamentalist religious beliefs. Becky, the youngest, lurches into this scene after a night’s drunken romp. The tension culminates with the revelation of an unlikely hero and family secrets that have overshadowed the sisters’ lives.
The central tension circles around Lorraine’s justification to cheat her sisters out of their inheritance while, at the same time, attempting to seduce her married pastor. In this small town Julie left at seventeen, the aging Las Vegas showgirl confronts the lost beauty she used to mask her insecurities. When she meets a cowboy on the bus, an unlikely romance ensues. Throughout the novel, Becky struggles to stay sober and out of jail until, finally, she finds a way to emancipate herself from her demons. The tension culminates in the dramatically assisted death of their mother and the revelation of their long-absent father’s secrets that have overshadowed their lives.
The novel has earned endorsements from Janet Fitch (White Oleander) and Tom Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon) as well as Judy Reeves (A Writer’s Book of Days). The novel was one of twenty-five finalists in the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Alum Associations’ first novel contest.