Cicada Grove

9781881048015

1881048012

Set in Kansas City, the novel, CICADA GROVE, explores family & romantic relationships gone awry. And it questions what love is to many contemporary Americans. Its main character, Penny, strives to build a life for herself & her daughter. But her passion undoes her. Like her namesake, Penelope of Greek mythology, she "wove each day & unraveled the cloth at night." Although Bowen loosely based Penny upon two women she knew whose love connections led them to tragedy, & although the sights & scenes in Kansas City are real, Bowen stresses that the story is fiction. In 1987, the CICADA GROVE manuscript won the grand prize in the Barbara Storck Creative Writing Contest. Its first chapter placed second in the fiction category that same year. "CICADA GROVE is experience distilled into art. The heroine dreams scenarios of happiness, but seems bound to the tracks of tragedy. CICADA GROVE is more than the story of one woman's quest for a workable life; it is a daring display of literary skill."--ROBERT DE MARIA , author, columnist, & former dean of the New School for Social Research in New York. "CICADA GROVE unravels with lurid intensity (in)...this slim novel, where drugs, sex,...child abuse, co-dependency, & crime disguised as charity are rampant & delivered with gut punches."--THE SUN NEWSPAPERS. "Brutally honest."--Terri McFerrin Smith, author of FALSE STARTS.