About this item
Passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, jazz and soul: a provocative debut novel about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer - trumpet player and old-school ladies' man - as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices.It's 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies' man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus.
About the Author
Laura Warrell is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Tin House Writer's Workshop, and has taught Creative Writing and Literature through the Emerging Voices program at PEN America Los Angeles, at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and at academic institutions in Los Angeles and Boston. She currently writes and teaches in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and Post Road Magazine. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is her first novel.