Stillwater: A Novel - Softcover

Hossack, Darcie Friesen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1990160204 ISBN 13: 9781990160202

Verlag: Tidewater Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

When Lizzy is forced to move to the Adventist commune of Stillwater, she is sure the end times have begun. She's not wrong.

Sixteen-year-old Lizzy is trapped, caught between her passion for science and the teachings of her Seventh-day Adventist father and Mennonite mother. But she isn't the only one with problems: her mother, Marie, is increasingly reliant on prescription medication to recover from a car accident that might – or might not – have been deliberately caused by her husband, Daniel.

In a bid to regain his social standing and self-esteem, Daniel moves the family to an Adventist commune in BC's Okanagan Valley, where Lizzy meets another recent arrival with secrets of his own. He helps her establish a clandestine connection to the outside world that she hopes will help her curb her tongue and retain her sanity long enough to finish high school, but her plans change when her younger brother, Zach, is threatened.

Lizzy and Zach flee to Marie's childhood home with their reluctant mother in tow. When her father arrives to take his family back to Stillwater, old resentments collide with new, forcing everyone to face a day of judgement.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Darcie Friesen Hossack is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers with roots in the Mennonite and Seventh-day Adventist communities. A career food writer and editor of the online WordCity Literary Journal, her short story collection, Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press), was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Evergreen Award for Adult Fiction. A resident of northern Alberta, Stillwater is her first novel.

Darcie Friesen Hossack is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers with roots in the Mennonite and Seventh-day Adventist communities. A career food writer and editor of the online WordCity Literary Journal, her short story collection, Mennonites Don't Dance (Thistledown Press), was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ontario Library Association's Forest of Reading Evergreen Award for Adult Fiction. A resident of northern Alberta, Stillwater is her first novel.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

When Lizzy is forced to move to the Adventist commune of Stillwater, she is sure the end times have begun. She’s not wrong.

As Covid-19 upends society, sixteen-year-old Lizzy is trapped between her passion for science and the conspiracy theories embraced by her Seventh-day Adventist father and Mennonite mother. But she isn’t the only one in crisis.

Her father, a nurse, is opposed to vaccines—the perfect excuse to relocate his injured, secretly drug-addicted wife and two children to a strict SDA commune in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

Once at Stillwater, Lizzy struggles to curb her tongue and adapt to a rigid ideology without abandoning her education. But a new threat forces her to flee with her younger brother and reluctant mother to a place where old resentments and buried history will provoke a day of judgement for the whole family.

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Prologue

Remember the day you punched the wall? You were tall enough to miss my head so your fist left a hole in the plaster. For as long as we lived in that house, I used it to measure my growth. Dad, I’m here with you now as the nurse comes in to check your oxygen and listen to your lungs. When she’s finished, she draws your covers back over you, and you’re so small you barely make a shape.

Some days I go home and sit in my empty bathtub. Everywhere else is too big, and I need to feel the walls around me. They keep me from breaking apart and scattering. Although, if I did that in there, I might just slip down the drain.

I’ll remember to put the stopper in next time.

In the bathtub, with the door closed and the light off, I’m underneath our basement stairs again. You never once found me there. Is it because you never looked? I wonder that now. Maybe you were glad when I disappeared. When you no longer had to harden yourself to make sure I didn’t grow up too soft.

This morning, I drove past our old house and remembered the day the washing machine was full of blankets and became unbalanced and made a terrible noise. When Mom, Zach and I all came running down the stairs, there you were, sitting on top of the lid, laughing and trying to keep the machine from shuddering its way across the room.

That should have been a good memory. But you got angry. You thought we were laughing at you. You didn’t know all you had to do was open the lid.

I still have the Messages to Young People you gave me for my baptism. The same copy that was given to you for yours. I brought it with me to school, Dad. It’s the only thing I have that belonged to you, otherwise I would dig a hole and bury it in our old backyard, next to all the birds and other things I found dead or killed, having lost their breath of life.

There are more things down there than you know. The neighbours’ cat that got hit by a car and the neighbours didn’t care. The casserole Zach made that you said tasted like sin. Mom’s wedding watch and the pretty blue church shoes you bought me once when you took me to the mall, and then got mad because I liked them too much. They’re all under the rhubarb. The shoes are still in their box. I never wore them. Not even once.

You know what I buried at Stillwater.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tidewater Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1990160204
• ISBN 13: 9781990160202
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 286
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland