Mermaid
They were the girls who didn’t drown.
In 1983, seven-year-old May and her older sister, Kate, sat in the back of their mother’s car watching the murky churn and roil of the San Francisco Bay. And then they were in its freezing depths. They were the “poor motherless girls” who made it—swimming up and out of the water to become survivors, forever defined by their mother’s inconceivable act.
And as they grow, the ripples of that day become a tide. May is a woman quietly haunted, clinging to a life of safe, solid ground. Kate has become a storm—volatile, self-destructive, and then…missing.
As May searches for her sister, she must confront the wreckage of their shared childhood and the hidden truth of her mother’s final act. Navigating the panic of Kate’s disappearance, May finds an unexpected anchor when Buddy—her high school sweetheart—returns to town years after a severe firefighting injury shattered his identity and their engagement. As they tentatively path a way back to one another, can a second-chance romance bloom between them?
Lyrical, raw, joyfully wry, and achingly sad, Mermaid explores the resilience of the sisterly bond, what it means to decide to live, and the courage it takes to forgive those who could not stay.
Night Diving
Night Diving is both a young woman’s coming-out story and a 30-something coming-of-age journey that proves you can go home again. It is the story of Rose Salino, a thirty-year-old woman living the San Francisco chic lesbian lifestyle, who loses her job as a chef and her lover on the same day. The next day her grandmother dies and in the course of returning to her hometown for a funeral, she sees her childhood best friend and first love, Jessie. They begin to rekindle their friendship, which later becomes a romance. Through a series of crises Rose is forced to look at her life and find the courage to create a future that is true to her real self and her heart.
With the support of friends and the hard lessons born from life’s challenges, Rose takes the risks to create a life she wants rather than the life she thinks she’s “supposed to have.”
“…a thoughtful and sensitive coming-of-age-and coming out-story, full of drama but balanced with enough intelligence and subtlety so that it doesn’t lapse into histrionics.”
—Library Journal