with Flatiron Books in 2017 and was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe best first novel prize by the Mystery Writers of America. Kennedy has worked as a reporter, teacher, and editor, as well as a cookie packer, ice cream scooper, and children’s baseball coach. She also holds a Master’s in Fiction Writing and English literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She currently lives in Forest Grove, Oregon with her mother and young son.
[My Book, The Movie: Tornado Weather; The Page 69 Test: Tornado Weather; Writers Read: Deborah E. Kennedy]
Kennedy's new novel is Billie Starr's Book of Sorries.
At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "stories set in Indiana [that] have a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf," including:
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess GuntyRead about the other entries on the list.
Read enough books set in Indiana, by Indiana writers, and you’ll start to notice the rust. The rust and rot and despair at the center of things, and that’s becausethe state used to be one of America’s most productive industrial hubs. Well-paid manufacturing jobs were everywhere… until they weren’t.
In this luminous National Book Award-winning debut, Tess Gunty takes us to the fictional town of Vacca Vale and the affordable housing complex, La Lapinière, commonly referred to as the Rabbit Hutch, where a smart and ambitious young woman named Blandine ruminates on Christian female mystics and ponders an act of eco-terrorism. Without resorting to spoilers, I’ll just say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you’ve noticed this book’s title being bandied about for some of the top awards in publishing, that’s no coincidence. It manages to achieve that much-sought after but rarely realized goal of an ending that is both surprising and inevitable. I can’t wait to see what Gunty writes next.
--Marshal Zeringue
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