Rejoice
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The modest stir in the little bookshop—one storefront wide—quieted as two women came out of a door marked “Office” and made their way to the front of the room. BRAINFOOD was about to welcome a first-time author in line with its policy of featuring books put out by small presses. It was one of a series of stores in small towns up and down the California
The author, a pretty girl of about twenty with a nimbus of carrot-colored hair, immediately zinged up the energy level of the room. She wore a yellow knit top, ankle-length floral skirt and red backpack. Gold-colored rings in her earlobes matched a smaller ring in her left nostril, and a ceramic oval with the zodiac sign for Aquarius hung on a leather thong around her neck. Delighted to be the center of attention, she smiled and wriggled her fingers at the small audience—a sprinkling of young women from the nearby junior college, a handful of gray-haired ladies who in an earlier generation would have been founding members of a Wednesday Afternoon Reading Circle, an old man who had already lapsed into a doze, and a pony-tailed young man sprawled on his chair, his feet in work boots reaching out into the aisle. He wore a copper ring in one earlobe and a metallic stud just south of his lower lip.
“Good evening and good reading to everybody. Let’s welcome our guest, Fern Miller, author of ‘Rejoice,’ “ said the store owner, who then began a description of her literary plans for the coming fall season.
Fern broke in. “Hi,” she said. “Welcome to my book tour. You’re, like, my first stop.” She grinned. “I still can’t, y’know, believe it. Me reading in a bookstore. It’s not like I’m literary or anything. Even if I write poems sometimes. This whole thing’s an accident, right?”
She pulled off her backpack, almost knocking over the glass of water on the table in front of her, then dug out a book and a bottle of water. “Never go anywhere without my own water bottle, right?”
She waved toward the display of a dozen books stacked behind several more standing on end to show the jacket illustration—a crowd of young people in a meadow, their arms upflung, heads back, mouths open. How was this audience to know the shout was
“The book just happened,” she said. “I went east, y’know, to visit my grandma when I finished college last May.
“My grandma’s a nice lady and she was good to us—me and my brother, Sky—when we were, y’know, growing up, and besides I loved doing it so I started writing it up and with the stuff my grandma had, pretty soon I had a lot of pages, right?”
Fern paused to take a swig from her water bottle.
“Now here’s the crazy part. She used to pay for us to go east and spend every Christmas with her and Grandpa. I loved working with her. She started telling me stories about when my mom was my age and Gran, like, couldn’t handle that my mom was in a commune. My brother thinks the whole book idea sucks. He’s in the book but I’m not. He was, like, born then but I wasn’t. But my mom said go ahead, why not. So.”
Fern paused to nod and smile.
“The commune’s still there. It’s called Bent Creek. In
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
A sometimes hilarious three-generational clash, of values plays out in REJOICE, a novel about a conventional mother, an uncompromising hippie daughter, and a devil-may-care granddaughter raised in an idealistic commune. The mother finally details her struggle in a memoir which she pays her granddaughter to tout on a do-it-yourself book tour.
The granddaughter is less interested in the book than she is in her’ gypsy hippie encounters with the pony-tailed know-it-all who is pursuing her. Soon her casual attitude toward life is put to the test when she falls in love with the dutiful son of a straight-laced Mexican widow. Do we hear wedding bells or fire sirens in the distance?
About the Author
Mildred M. Jeffrey, a professor ernerita of literature and creative writing at
She lives in the