Perris, California
A Novel
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4.0 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A glorious debut...it will rouse your deepest well of empathy.” —Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Good Left Undone
“This novel will live alongside classics of young womanhood.” —Susan Straight, author of bestsellers Mecca and In the Country of Women
In this unforgettable first novel, twenty-seven-year-old Tessa, pregnant with her third child and living in a trailer on her mother-in-law’s property, encounters the woman she used to love—leading Tessa to question the very foundations of the life she’s built
Abandoned first by her father and then her mother, as a girl Tessa is left to live with her abusive stepfather and stepbrother. She survives by finding reserves of strength in herself, and by the surprising, trans-formative love of another teenage girl, Mel, who sees through Tessa’s tough exterior to the vulnerable, scarred, loving woman inside. When she suddenly loses Mel, too, Tessa stumbles into a saving grace of a different kind with Henry and his mama, Angie, becoming a mother and finding herself in a familial existence that somehow carries her into adulthood—until the day she runs into Mel, who has just returned to Perris after years away.
Filled with violence, tragedy, tenderness, longing, and the unvarnished courage of women living in a mostly unseen America, Perris, California is the utterly gripping story of Tessa’s journey from trauma to healing, and it introduces us to one of the most indelible female characters since Bone Boatwright in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina or Ruth Langmore in Ozark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stark debuts with an emotionally charged portrait of two women's painful family histories and their uneasy reunion in California's Inland Empire. Tessa Jenson, pregnant with her third child at 27 and struggling to raise two rambunctious young children, runs into her high school friend and lover, Mel, who's recently returned to town after a decade away. At 16, the girls were broken up by Mel's mother, who disapproved of their relationship, though it's Mel whom Tessa feels bitter toward. Now, the women attempt to renew their friendship, which adds to the ongoing tension in Tessa's marriage with Henry, who knows how much she loved Mel as a girl and whose own mother's constant presence makes it difficult for Tessa to find her bearings as a parent. Exacerbating those challenges are Tessa's memories of postpartum depression following her first daughter's birth, which are triggered by her pregnancy and had to do with her feelings about her own mother. In vivid flashbacks, Stark gradually doles out details of the physical and sexual abuse Tessa and her late mother endured at the hands of her stepfather and his son, deepening the well-developed theme of strained mother-daughter relationships. Fans of Dorothy Allison or Pam Houston ought to seek this out.
