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Barbara Monier has been writing since her earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year and the first in Michigan's history for a piece written directly for the screen. Pushing the River (Amika Press, October, 2018) is the latest of her three novels. You, In Your Green Shirt and A Little Birdie Told Me (available on Amazon) are her previous titles.

In Pushing the River, Barbara Monier's third novel, a family crisis erupts when a fifteen-year-old becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Madeline describes her house as an empty shell inhabited by ghosts. She has been living alone for years, keeping to a few rooms, surrounded by the possessions of her ex-husband and grown children. Over the course of four months, people accumulate in the household one by one--including Madeline's new love interest, who unexpectedly shows up carrying grocery bags full of his clothes. Pushing the River is told largely through Madeline's eyes. As we discover how she came to "push the river," the unfolding action is interspersed with Madeline's memories of her own mother, driving a message of sometimes-anarchic confusion, occasional angst, and powerfully abiding love across the generations of a familiar American family.

Kindle Price: $5.95

Category: Literature & Fiction

A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME, a novel by Barbara L. Monier, takes place over the summer and fall of 1972, in the six months leading up to narrator CATHERINE’s sixteenth birthday. Thrust headlong into an identity crisis when her mother reveals that she had actually planned to marry someone else, Catherine decides to begin a journal in an effort to find solidity and permanence in her own life. Hilariously funny, impetuous, impatient, sometimes annoying and always remarkable, Catherine freely quotes literature, pops pills, and casts her eye unflinchingly around her world as she takes the reader through a unique coming-of-age tale. During the awkward summer in which Catherine is just barely too young to get either a paying job or drive, she learns that her fraternal twin sister Lizzy has been accepted at a prestigious dance academy and will be leaving home, separating the sisters who had begun their lives, Catherine muses, “so close that every bit of our bodies was pressed tight tight together, a time when we didn’t even understand that we were two different people, but just felt somehow that we were one being with an extra bunch of limbs. ”As Catherine’s mother continues to drop hints about a former life and a lost love, Catherine decides to undertake her own detective mission to piece together the puzzle of her mother’s past. As she scours the nooks and crannies of her home, she finds remnants of her own childhood as well as her mother’s youth. When Catherine ultimately discovers a large bundle of letters from her mother’s former lover, as well as a handful that her mother wrote to him, she encounters a young woman who seems to be an entirely different person than the mother she knows. Catherine sneaks the letters from their hiding place every chance she gets and pours over them in her room; meantime, a very confused cardinal continually attacks his own reflection in her window. Catherine becomes nearly obsessed with both her mother’s story and the troubling behavior of the bird, her feelings for each one paralleling the other as she moves from concern, to anger, to frustration. Set quietly against a background of radically shifting times – the near end of the Vietnam War, racial tensions, changing sex roles and more, A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME is ultimately a deeply affirming story. At the book’s end, as Catherine lay in traction following a car accident, she has learned lessons from her own experiences, her mother’s, and from the relentless bird; she is ready and resolved to move forward in a fully realized, fully embraced life.

Kindle Price: $2.99

Category: Literature & Fiction

YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT, by Barbara Monier, follows a woman coming back to life after the disintegration of a twenty-plus year marriage. The book opens with Madeline Bruno and her family sitting around the dinner table as husband Dick recounts his fascination with a new female employee. Within a few quick, jabbing lines, 14-year-old son Jack accuses his father of being "involved" with her, 11-year-old daughter Kate hurls insults, and Madeline has retreated into a fantasy that her once-beloved husband has turned into a giant, scurrying cockroach. As Madeline struggles through each incremental breakdown of her lovingly-created marriage and world, she is alarmed to find herself having vivid fantasies about her daughter’s music teacher. At first feeling that this must be an aberration and indictment of her maternal skills, she gradually allows herself to experience long-numbed feelings of desire for connection. Encounters with the musician, both real and imagined, become more and more playful, flirtatious, and sexual, such as when she attends his very formal concert and imagines hurling herself from the balcony directly into his lap below. Ultimately Madeline realizes that this largely-fantasied “relationship” has served its purpose; it has enabled her to be ready for the real world of middle-aged, post-millennium dating and men. Neighborhood friends talk her into trying the internet dating scene, which she tackles with utter trepidation but also determination and gusto. Madeline wades through on-line dating profiles. She unravels the protocol of first encounters via e-mail and phone. She has her first “first date” in more than twenty-five years, wandering through a shopping mall with a man before dissolving into tears back in her car. When daughter Kate notices that the neighborhood “catch” has his eye on her mother, Madeline is more than a little skeptical. But when a four-year friendship between Madeline and Bud crosses the line into romance, the results move quickly from heated passion to an aftermath of woeful regret. Back to the online dating scene, Madeline meets Robert, a long-divorced business owner with a dog Madeline ultimately feels far more affection for than his eccentric owner. Though Robert becomes somewhat of a steady beau, they both agree they should keep the door open to meeting others. The final chapters of the book find Madeline meeting an internet date at a local coffee house, her fantasies once again taking hold of her as she envisions a new life with him, fully recovered and wholly alive. But it becomes clear that her fantasies are actually memories here. She is telling this entire story to Jim, the story of everything that led to this moment, when she would meet and fall in love with him.

Kindle Price: $2.99

Category: Literature & Fiction