Untreed Reads discussion

Fandom, growing up and attachments to the past are all given a think:

This week, join me as we continue to look at books that orbit the constellations of children’s series books much-loved by adults: Louisa May Alcott’s books, the Little House books, the Anne of Green Gables books, and Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. A brand new novel, Venom on the River, is now available from my favorite young adult mystery author, Marsha Qualey. This time around, she has written a book for adult readers which intersects with a convention of extreme fans of the “Little Girl” series. The fan group in the book is an amalgam of actual groups who talk to each other on listservs, Facebook, and Twitter; throng around author tables at conventions; seek out artifacts from the books; raise money to restore houses and build museums.

Head over to Children's Literature Network for the interview and stop by Untreed Reads to learn more about Venom and the River.

Venom and the River by Marsha Qualey:

Several hundred women are about to converge on tiny Pepin, Minnesota, to celebrate the birthday of Ida May Turnbull, the long-dead author of a beloved series of children’s books. When the “Little Girls” gather in Pepin, one woman finds life has changed forever.

Leigh Burton is a disgraced journalist who was stripped of a Pulitzer for fabricating details in a few newspaper stories. In the years since, Leigh has been scratching out a living as a freelancer, and has arrived in Pepin to assist an aged former vice president of the United States with his memoirs. Because no publisher will buy any nonfiction with her fingerprints on it, Leigh has to keep her past under wraps, which becomes a challenge when she’s gently blackmailed by a Pepin local, and Leigh’s sixteen-year-old daughter arrives unexpectedly and threatens to tell everyone Mom’s secret. Making things even more difficult is that Leigh is living in Ida May Turnbull’s long-shuttered childhood home, which puts her in the bulls-eye of the Little Girls’ obsession. It’s a position that jeopardizes her secret, her work, a budding romance, and her fragile relationship with her daughter.