A first novel about a young girl who is looking for love and guidance from her Auntie Mame mother and her absent father.

When Eunice is 10 years old, her father comes back to Wild Pea, Illinois, and promises to buy her a horse. She never sees him again. Her mother, Mern, is heartbroken but soon comforted by the attentions of the flawed but loving Sam Podesta. Eunice grows up fighting for love from the people who should love her unconditionally but is bolstered by love from unexpected sources, her downstairs neighbor, a Holocaust survivor, and her pet turtle, Eunice Turtle. As a young teenager, she is literally rescued by Rose, a patient teacher, who loses her to foster care and Eunice's first stirrings of romantic love. Eunice is a lonely, artistic girl who grows into a temperamental young woman whose strength and capacity for love belie her tough upbringing. This is poet Kushner's first novel, and her roots show; passages describing even the bleakest midwestern landscapes are artfully drawn. A coming-of-age story that wonderfully combines literary style with heartbreaking plot twists and still manages to be uplifting, even before the epilogue that ties everything together. "Booklist""

Dale M. Kushner graduated from the Vermont College MFA Program in Creative Writing, and founded The Writer's Place, a literary centre in Madison, Wisconsin. Ms. Kushner is a recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant in the Literary Arts, a fellowship at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. As well, she was a participant with other leading writers in the recent Fetzer Institute's first writers' retreat on compassion and forgiveness. Her work has been widely published in literary journals including IMAGE, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, Witness, Fifth Wednesday and elsewhere. Her most recent poetry book More Alive Than Lions Roaring was a finalist for The May Swenson Poetry Award at Utah State Press, The Prairie Schooner Book Competition, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize at University of Utah Press and The Tupelo Prize. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family and dog, Carmelita. This is her first novel.