Judy Garland, Ginger Love

Book excerpt: In her extraordinary debut novel, critically acclaimed poet Nicole Cooley takes readers on a humorous, achingly beautiful journey to a world of magical escapes and startling restorative truths. Judy Garland, Ginger Love is about motherhood and sisterhood, being and becoming, loving and learning to let go. I know about sisters. Being a sister is the role in life I've always been best at, the one part I could play well. When I tried to become a mother, I failed. After a tragic pregnancy leaves Alice Carson bereft and unmoored, she turns for comfort not to her husband, but rather to her estranged identical twin Madeline. However, this attempted return to the past is fraught with emotional landmines. While Alice, calm and serious, is the older sister, born five minutes earlier, the explosive and wild Madeline has dominated the pair's solitary lives since childhood. From birth, Alice and Madeline shared a private, imaginary world--one colored by the larger-than-life tale of the dazzling and tragic MGM star Judy Garland. Handed down from their grandmother to their mother and now to them, the dramatic story of the actress' rise to stardom inspires Alice and Madeline to create their own Emerald City. Playing out their deepest fantasies in the empty swimming pool of the cheap New Orleans motel they called home, the young Alice and Madeline transform themselves into Judy Garland and her "baby sister" Ginger Love. The twins' enchanted world is shattered the day their mother abandons them, vanishing with little more than a brief goodbye. Now, years later, Alice gives herself up to her sister's outrageous scheme to find Lily. Having lost her unborn daughter, Alice desperately hopes to get her mother back. As the open road draws the sisters closer to their past, two women come face to face with life's painful realities; for the nearer they come to recapturing Emerald City, the more Madeline unravels, and the more Alice begins to see where her home is, and where her heart truly belongs. Judy Garland, Ginger Love resonates with profound insights that will leave no reader untouched. "A touching return to love." --Barbara Esstman, author of Night Ride Home