A one night stand, an imploding marriage, and a small Southern town full of secrets combine in Joshilyn Jackson's The Almost Sisters, which rocketed onto the July LibraryReads list at number 7. Joshilyn stopped by LLF to share what making this amazing list means to her:
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When my editor called me and told me The Almost Sisters was a LibraryReads Pick, I let out a barbaric yawp and a did a spontaneous dance that had a lot to do with joy and very little to do with personal dignity. I danced, in fact, like nobody was looking, even though my husband, our two dogs, and Cat the Younger were right there. Once I shared the news, Scott danced with me, and the dogs milled about excitedly with no idea why. Cat the Younger acted like he was too cool to care, sitting complacent on the china cabinet, looking down his nose at us.
Scott went out and bought a frosty bottle of sparkling rosé and popped it open, saying we were going to drink the whoooole thing. Confession: he doesn’t much care for it… I married well. It was worth the wee, pink, bubble-induced headache I had in the morning; it’s the kind of news that we celebrate like crazy-pants at my house.
I tell you all this so you will know how much you matter—how much this means to writers like me.
My job mostly takes place in my dark cave of a bedroom, me in enormous pajamas with feral hair, crunched up in the bed with a laptop, grunting and puffing when it goes poorly and cackling into the screen like a smug hyena when I get into that high-like zone where story falls out of me feeling whole. It is very solitary and weird, an oddly private process with a hopefully very public end result.
I try to get people and things and places that are so real to me, and so beloved to me, to run out of my brain and down through my fingers and out in the form of words. It’s a long, fraught trip from the brain to the page, made in the hopes that these words will work as a road map, bringing readers to tiny imaginary Birchville, Alabama.
I want folks to see Leia Birch, the narrator, the way I see her: brassy, bright, funny, nerd-cool, but also flawed, with a crack in her deepest heart. I want people to visit the town her family founded just after the Civil War on the burned out bones of a ‘Bama hamlet. I want people who came from the small town South to recognize elements of their own communities, and those raised elsewhere to feel they have truly armchair travelled. Hopefully visitors will understand my homeland a little better, love its beautiful pieces, understand our flaws.
And truthfully? Writers don’t know how well our maps are working to bring readers to our imaginary lands, not truly, until the book goes out into the world.
Here is what I know about librarians: you guys are True North readers. If you like it enough to make it a LibraryReads Pick, my map must have gotten you to this place I so want folks to visit. Moreover, I also know what huge, glorious mouths you have—you guys talk books, and readers listen.
And while I write alone, and while I write very much for my own pleasure, I also write to be read. Thank you for visiting Birchville, double thank you for liking it enough to say so out loud in total public, and, most of triple thankin’ all, thank you for all you do to get books like mine into the hands of readers.
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Thanks, Joshilyn! The Almost Sisters goes on sale July 11, so all you readers out there should make sure to dive into this powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South as soon as it hits shelves.
-Amanda