Trade Paperback, 352 pages ISBN-13: 9780446582360
www.joshilynjackson.com
Description:
When a long-hidden grave is unearthed in the backyard, headstrong young Mosey Slocumb is determined to investigate. What she learns could cost her family everything…
My Thoughts:Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the Slocumb women. Now, as their youngest turns fifteen, a whole new kind of commotion is chasing all three generations. Mosey’s desperate to know who used their yard as a make-shift cemetery, and why. The oldest, forty-five year old Ginny, fights to protect Mosey from the truth, a fight that could cost Ginny the love of her life. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, with the answers trapped inside her. To survive Liza’s secrets and Mosey’s insistent adventures, Ginny must learn to trust the love that braids the strands of their past—and stop at nothing to defend their future.
In A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson three generations of Slocumb women are struggling to get by in their small Mississippi town while facing incredible odds set against them. Ginny, who is called Big by her daughter and granddaughter knows that every fifteen years something bad happens to Slocumb women and they are on the cusp of that bad year. When Big was 15, she had her fierce daughter, Liza. History repeated itself when Liza had her daughter at 15. Now Mosey is fifteen. Mosey has faced a life time of being warned about and away from this curse, but the curse may be taking other directions for this generation. Liza has had a stroke and then a small grave is unearth in the backyard. Can Big hold her family together while trying to find an explanation? And will Mosey discover the answers she seeks?
The chapters in Joshilyn Jackson's A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty alternate between the three Slocumb women. Each woman has a distinct voice in her chapter and there is strong character development for each woman individually. What they are thinking can be very different from what they are sharing with each other, especially since Liza is essentially nonverbal, but each of them is facing the threat to their family and the questions the mystery brings head-on, in their own way.
Why, oh why, did I wait so long to read A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty? This is an outstanding novel by a most accomplished writer. I've enjoyed every book Jackson has written and this incredible novel is no exception. The multilayered plot is complex and I appreciate how additional information was slowly discovered. And I completely understood Big hiding her suspicions from Mosely while Mosely is doing the same. I was absolutely spellbound and immersed in this novel. You couldn't have torn me away from reading it. And when I finished reading, I knew that I had just read something splendid, flawless, sublime... and perfect. When I was done there was not one thing I would have wanted differently. Bravo, Joshilyn Jackson!
Jackson has a new novel being released this November, Someone Else's Love Story, and I am going to just preorder it now and schedule time to read it right away.
Very Highly Recommended - one of the very best
Excerpt
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