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by Patricia Boomsma
by Patricia Boomsma
Amanda decides to go to college in Indiana, away from Phoenix and a mother she thinks is too protective and the tension between her divorced parents.
Susan, Amanda's mother, works to adjust to life without her daughter around, while dealing with the disintegration of her family and her less than satisfactory job as a lawyer in a large law firm.
Amanda revels in the freedom of university life away from her over-protective mom, while Susan feels adrift as her attempts to fill Amanda’s absence with romance and ambition prove disappointing. When Amanda joins a religious commune, drawn in by its seductive promise of certainty and love, Susan fears she has lost Amanda to a cult.
Crosswind is a compelling weave of Amanda's and Susan's intertwined stories that show the appeal and danger of living in a closed community with a charismatic leader and the fraught relationship of a mother and daughter looking for a safe place to call home.
"In Crosswind, Patricia Boomsma does what we fiction writers always hope to accomplish: she makes the reader crave whatever happens next. She creates a genuinely gripping plot. As chapters roll, the stakes get higher, the danger more intense. At one level, it's a mother/daughter tale. At another, it's a story about decisions: bad ones, good ones, and those made so long ago their value has accumulated meaning beyond categories. These pages are jam-packed with consequences, the real stuff that happens to people who've lost their way, who've lost a sense of home, who've forgotten that our mothers are waiting, every moment, to walk us back from the brink of doom. It's a page-turner in the best sense. You'll need to blast through it because you'll want to know who gets saved, who doesn't make it, and who gets forgiven." — John Mauk, author of Where All Things Flatten and Field Notes for the Earthbound
Details
Details
Bink Books
246 pp. ● 6x9
$19.95 (pb) ● $9.99 (eb)
ISBN 978-1-960373-60-1 (pb)
FICTION / Religious
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Coming of Age
Publication date: October 15, 2024
Patricia Boomsma is a retired Arizona lawyer now writing full time. She earned a master’s degree in English from Purdue University, a law degree from Indiana University in Indianapolis, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte. Her publications include short stories in Scarlet Leaf Review, Persimmon Tree, and Vignette Review. Indolent Press published her poem “Arc of the Apocalypse” both online and in the anthology “Poems From the Aftermath.” Her first novel, The Way of Glory (Edeleboom Books 2018), won the Bill Fisher Award for Best First Book-Fiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association and a First Place/Best in Category Chaucer Award from Chanticleer Book Reviews.
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