Dear Daughter

Jane Jenkins, the heroine of Little’s assured fiction debut, single-mindedly pursues one goal when she’s released from a California women’s prison. After serving 10 years of her sentence for the 2003 murder of her mother, socialite and philanthropist Marion Elsinger, she wants desperately to find out if she was indeed the culprit. Public opinion, led by the media and including crime blogger Trace Kessler, strongly leans toward belief in her guilt. Armed with a false persona, Jane disappears from the public eye and even her lawyer’s protection to follow the slimmest of leads into her secretive, tempestuous mother’s mysterious past in tiny, decaying Adeline, S.Dak., and its mirror community of Ardelle. Little (Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America’s Languages) effectively intersperses outside perspective in the form of emails, text messages, and other communications in Jane’s entertainingly caustic first-person narrative (e.g., “Multi-tools are like insults, girls—you should always have one on hand”). [em]Agent: Kate Garrick, DeFiore and Company. (Aug.) [/em]