A Trip Through the Doll Fields (Unabridged‪)‬

One human baby. Several plastic dolls. Three overlapping stories. Many lives changed.

A Trip Through the Doll Fields serves up with a bit of the flavor of Tom Robbins’s vision, piqued with a pinch of Neil Gaiman’s whimsy, with a dash of Hunter S. Thompson’s recklessness for adventure—but with less drugs. The story is a celebration of good intentions, poor judgment, inevitable life challenges, and out-of-the-box coping strategies in a world where conventional solutions prove irrelevant.

When a young couple, Allison and Nigel, break house arrest to visit a nudist colony, their lives become intertwined with a visionary lawn ornament artist and a pair of women, Annalise and Lakshmi, who compulsively steal Baby Jesuses from church nativities. While on their road trip, Nigel loses their baby daughter in a novelty shop and deserts Allison, who finds herself lost in a strange town and deep in a mushroom trip. At the same time, after keeping one step ahead of a copycat Baby Jesus abductor and the law, Annalise and Lakshmi's own fun comes to an end after Annalise finds out she has a serious illness. The disarray created by the characters’ life-changing events summons forth a shared waking dream that connects the lost baby, a nudist colony, a lawn ornament artist, inexplicable roadside attractions, cancer treatments, and a car loaded down with piles of plastic Baby Jesuses.

In a quirky universe in which characters both search for and avoid meaning when little makes sense, A Trip Through the Doll Fields will enchant you with a poignant world of magical realism as experienced through the hearts and eyes of complex, vulnerable characters who stumble through, navigate, and ultimately survive poor choices, broken relationships, cancer treatments, loss, and survivor guilt.