Novel forthcoming with Palimpsest Press. Fall 2027.
What are we willing to do to live a life of our own design?
The dreams that faint and fail, alas!
And there the days of hope gone by!
— Maurice Maeterlinck
From the moment her daughter Grace is born with a birthmark covering her face, Louise Baillie knows she will do anything to shield her child from the cruelty in the world, cruelty she knows all too well. When the past knocks on her door, Louise chooses the financial and social protection of a wealthy local politician over an unstable future with the man she loves.
After her mother marries a charismatic creep, Grace’s life of confinement moves from a bedroom in a boarding house to a bigger bedroom in a mansion – with a lock on the outside. When her new uncle promises a life beyond her dreams, a life where she might live alongside the seven-foot-tall poet she met at a local fair, she runs away to the carnival.
Louise’s daughter is abducted by her husband’s brother and he does nothing; the life he promised becomes an inescapable nightmare, for her and for different people like her daughter. Death may be the only way to save them, and herself.
Grace discovers there is no life of one’s own choosing when gawkers want The Ugliest Woman in the World to play the piano – not Grace who knows Schumann from memory – and protestors shout that she’d be happier off stage, hidden away, again.
With protestors threatening the existence of sideshow performers and a horrific truth hiding behind closed doors – and in the performance of empathy among “polite” society, neither Grace nor Louise could have predicted how things would take a turn. At its core, DREAMS OF THE WEARY is a love story: a novel about chosen family, self-acceptance, hope, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and her daughter.
Stay tuned for updates.
A writer. 