About this item
Reliance, Illinois tells the story of a young woman faced with choices that will alter the course of her own future, and offers a brilliant window into American life during a period of tumultuous change.Illinois, 1874: With a birthmark covering half her face, thirteen-year-old Madelyn Branch is accustomed to cold and awkward greetings, and expects no less in the struggling town of Reliance. After all, her mother, Rebecca, was careful not to mention a daughter in the Matrimonial Times ad that brought them there. When Rebecca weds, Madelyn poses as her mother's younger sister and earns a grudging berth in her new house. Deeply injured by her mother's deceptions, Madelyn soon leaves to enter the service of Miss Rose Werner, prodigal daughter of the town's founder.
About the Author
I grew up ten miles outside of Grass Valley, California, a Sierra Nevada foothill town in the heart of gold country. Dad taught high school special Ed. Mom was a librarian, a second grade and then a middle school English teacher, so most of my early memories feature blackboards, books, dusty, deserted playgrounds, and bigger kids who were mostly tolerant and kind, in a dismissive sort of way. I adored them all but idolized Jean, a tall, freckled blond girl in my older brother's class.
Jean was bigger than most of the boys, faster too, and her knees were branded with the most exquisite collection of bruises I'd ever seen. Jean taught me how to dribble a basketball, how to elbow my way into games, how to play through bloody noses, how to go get the ball when the boys wouldn't pass to you. I wanted to be Jean. But any playground respect I might have earned as her understudy was undercut by the fact I was a teacher's kid, and a crier, and too eager to please for my own good. It also didn't help that I loved to read and play make believe with another, brainy and distinctly uncool faction of kids who became my lasting friends.
I never imagined I'd write books, though I read constantly and made up stories to act out with my best friend Amy in the manzanita bushes behind our house. At ten I dreamed of two things. Playing NBA basketball with Magic Johnson, and singing in Star Makers! a junior high song and dance troupe complete with sequined leotards and tap shoes. One of these dreams came true, but I have burned all video evidence. I did some success on the basketball court. At any rate I performed well enough in high school to earn a scholarship to play at Saint Mary's, a small, division one college on the west coast. We won a lot, which was great, but I was undersized and rarely played, which wasn't great. It also became clear in my wretched first year, that I was not cut out to be a pre-med student. (I thought athletes were competitive!) After fumbling around a few semesters I found a home with English majors, many of whom also wrote squalid little poems and stories in beat up notebooks, and what's more, admitted to doing so.
After college I studied writing on a Rotary Scholarship at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales. Here, with the naïve confidence of a novice, I decided to write a novel, and set about it with an athlete's bullheaded determination, blocking out time and showing up each day whether I felt like it or not. In fiction I found a medium appropriate for the outsized emotions that had always plagued me. The best thing about books - writing or reading them - is that you're invited to feel and think deeply with, and for, other people. Even people who never existed, or lived hundreds of years before you. I also tried my hand at acting in Wales but my first role as a mad lawyer in the Duchess of Malfi was also my last. The whole venture felt too
