Millennium Chronicles
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
“I never really thought he was going to be a problem until the police woke me at four in the morning one Saturday night to say they had found Jack dead, young too, alongside the interstate far beyond the end of the boardwalk. When my shift was over sometime around midnight I had gone home and crawled into bed. About the same time Jack had gone to a party and had begun making loud, stupid, passes at somebody's wife, obnoxious and weird to the point where the friends of the husband at the party, themselves as a group not a lot to write home about but with justice on their side, were taking it all the wrong way. The best one of the husband's friends had offered my husband a ride home and then thrown him out of the car along I-95 on the way to Baltimore at fifty miles an hour. To finish him off, the friend went back and shot Jack in the head. The Maryland state police wanted a positive identification from me that Sunday morning in the dawn, and I couldn't even make out what had been the features of my second husband's face.”
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Ellie is stuck and following a series of events, her state of mind gradually becomes unstuck. She sees ghosts and has conversations with people who really should not be there, particularly two (dead) husbands, out of the four she has had. Children she thought she knew are growing up strange and too fast. Hearts and personalities seem to change, situations go from very predictable to anything but. It is the last season of the end of the millennium too, and the story is played out against Y2K fever and frenzy.
Overlapping her story is the end-of-the-century events from 12-year-old Noel's perspective, who wants to be mature and finished and, like Ellie, often pretends to be. They both ached to break out of their small-town lives in the American Rust Belt. Television, magazines, pop culture, Rosie O’Donnell, and - most importantly - Oprah are what Noel cares about, and little Noel is a fixer. Ellie does not seem to care about anything anymore. Oprah launches one of her famous fan contests, this one for children. Noel decides to go on a quest to win the contest, meet Oprah, and fix everybody’s lives, especially Ellie’s, by New Year’s Eve.
About the Author
Rita Vitolo went into journalism and writing jobs directly after graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. She taught writing in Pittsburgh-area colleges and wrote fiction throughout the 1980s, then moved to Florida before returning to Pittsburgh to write stories about the city as a freelance journalist. Since the mid-1990s she has been a science and medical writer for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Rita is currently working on her next work of contemporary fiction.