Reflecting on the charged, difficult passage from childhood and the arbitrary nature of personality, JUNIPER STREET explores, in an interspersed series of snapshots, its narrator's memory of her strange, formative adventures with her then-best friend, a spirited young artist who lives down the street. In autumnal tones, JUNIPER STREET considers the movement of time, the selves we shed over years, and-like remembered music-a mysterious, burnished quality of inevitability about the past.
ADVANCE PRAISE
"In this dazzling novella, Joan Frank writes of two perfectly realized young girls in their distinctly sad families. Frank's detail of the interior lives of her characters is as remarkable and beautiful as her detail of the homes they inhabit and the California seasons and cities they wander through. I could not stop reading this beautiful story."
-Martha Bergland, author of A Farm Under a Lake
"A tale of parental secrecy and disrupted friendship, Juniper Street takes readers on a poignant journey through time, emotion and revelation-as unforgettable as it is devastating. Frank has long distinguished herself as masterful stylist with a distinctive gift for the short novel; the lyrical resonance of Juniper Street reaffirms her place alongside Penelope Lively and Jane Smiley in the pantheon. Part gem, part amulet, all magic."
-Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein's Beach House
"This novel's embedded mysteries shake the heart. Joan Frank bends time, illuminating the romance of children's desires and fears, bafflement and dreams, followed hard and fast by the alert sorrow of adult regret. Who writes like this, one beautiful sentence after another, with such elegant tenderness and capacious intelligence? The closest I can imagine: the astonishing Shirley Hazzard. Frank strikes at what it means to learn, too late, about the suffering of those we love and what in those we love we shun and fear most in ourselves. This extraordinary novel is meant for all of us."
-Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories
"Nabokov wished "to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times;" in Juniper Street, Joan Frank has done just that. Delving into the confluence of memory and place, she shows us the joys of the lost world, as well as its terrors-and for the reader, the great provocation to remember one's own past. A beautiful novel."
-Lewis Buzbee, author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop