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Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel
Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel
Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel
Ebook493 pages7 hours

Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel

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Five challenging years have passed in the lives of the ladies of Bad Girl Creek. Beryl, Nance, Ness, and Phoebe have experienced their share of hardship and heartache, but also much happiness.
Beryl now lives with Earl in Alaska, where the fissures in their relationship have started to spread. When Earl disappears one wintry night, some dark and desperate memories surface, forcing Beryl to take inventory and withdraw from her friends while she works things out. Nance, on the heels of a string of devastating miscarriages, has been advised to stop trying for a baby. Phoebe finds herself overwhelmed by her own daughter, Sally, who is five-years-old-going-on-thirty; meanwhile she is being romanced by an enigmatic Southern charmer named Andrew. And Ness tenderly nurses David Snow as he gradually succumbs to AIDS. The farm's successes have brought profits, but when a nursery opens across the road, the bar is set higher yet again. As Beryl wonders at Earl's fate, she is isolated by more than geography. Even as her friends in California are wondering what happened to Beryl, Beryl wonders the very same thing.
But life rolls on, and in the midst of myriad misfortunes come explosive surprises. The old friends are challenged to reunite once again, to rediscover with fresh eyes the powerful words in Aunt Sadie's journal: Live life to the fullest. Love as often as you can. Regret nothing. Eat hearty. Laugh often. Plant flowers. And don't forget to dance.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 19, 2004
ISBN9780743253871
Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel
Author

Jo-Ann Mapson

Jo-Ann Mapson, a third generation Californian, grew up in Fullerton as a middle child with four siblings. She dropped out of college to marry, but later finished a creative writing degree at California State University, Long Beach. Following her son's birth in 1978, Mapson worked an assortment of odd jobs teaching horseback riding, cleaning houses, typing resumes, and working retail. After earning a graduate degree from Vermont College's low residency program, she taught at Orange Coast College for six years before turning to full-time writing in 1996. Mapson is the author of the acclaimed novels Shadow Ranch, Blue Rodeo, Hank Chloe, and Loving Chloe."The land is as much a character as the people," Mapson has said. Whether writing about the stark beauty of a California canyon or the poverty of an Arizona reservation, Mapson's landscapes are imbued with life. Setting her fiction in the Southwest, Mapson writes about a region that she knows well; after growing up in California and living for a time in Arizona and New Mexico, Mapson lives today in Cosa Mesa, California. She attributes her focus on setting to the influence of Wallace Stegner.Like many of her characters, Mapson has ridden horses since she was a child. She owns a 35-year-old Appaloosa and has said that she learned about writing from learning to jump her horse, Tonto. "I realized," she said, "that the same thing that had been wrong with my riding was the same thing that had been wrong with my writing. In riding there is a term called `the moment of suspension,' when you're over the fence, just hanging in the air. I had to give myself up to it, let go, trust the motion. Once I got that right, everything fell into place."

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    Goodbye, Earl - Jo-Ann Mapson

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