Mandy Houk began work on her first novel, Cloud Hunting, in the fall of 2004. She completed the first draft in the winter of 2005, and the rewrites and final edits in the spring of 2007. It is currently under review with select agents.
Mandy's characters will engage you, frustrate you, make you laugh, and capture your heart. And the setting of Cloud Hunting, the fictional town of Ogden Falls, Georgia, will have you wishing you could visit, though you might not want to live there.
Cloud Hunting's themes of forgiveness, our own frequently faulty perceptions of others, and the eternal pull of family and home will appeal to readers of books that make them laugh and speak to their hearts.
Overview
More than thirty years after leaving home by the light of a cold October moon, Luci Turner Malone returns to the small town of Ogden Falls, Georgia. She finds her little sister, Patricia, transformed into a bitter middle-aged woman, her parents buried under a willow tree, and the townspeople still occupied with cooking, pickling, and gossip.
Excerpt
The air in the room fairly shimmered. The curtains were open and the sunset sky bled into the room, illuminating the suspended specks of dust in an eerie wash of copper. As if fairies had recently departed and left a trail. Patricia’s temples pounded and she felt the weight of the past few days on her face, piled heavy on top of the last thirty years. She was drooped, faded, grey, frail, on the verge of disintegrating.
She took a few faltering steps into the room and ran her hand along the dresser, the chest, the footboard on the bed. Every surface was clean and gleaming, the bed made up smooth and taut with crisp white bedding that Patricia had never seen. She wasn’t sure what she had expected in here but this wasn’t it.
She thought of the abandoned rooms she’d read about in fairy tales and ghost stories: rooms thick with choking dust, musty with neglect, everything paralyzed and left to age. Or on television shows about missing persons, where the obsessive mother had kept things clean, but left every hair bow and scrap of paper in precisely the same place, as if time had not advanced at all without the absent loved one. Neither of these images were anything like this room she was standing in, struggling to recognize it.
She came all the way around the room and stopped in front of the dresser. There was a wedding photo of herself and Max, gazing off into that middle distance that photographers always point to. Their faces were full of youth and hope and wonder. Next to that was a baptism picture of Emily, her mouth wide open in a silent scream at the stiff ruffles Patricia had buttoned and tied and laced her in. Then there was Daddy’s retirement party invitation: ivory parchment framed in black walnut.
She and Daddy had lived in Mama’s dust and clutter all those years, extending grace since they assumed she didn’t have it in her to keep things up. But perhaps she just didn’t have the proper motivation. Patricia sank to the bed, baffled, and let the minutes tick away. Had Mama been keeping the room up all these years, keeping it ready for Luci’s return? As far as Patricia knew, the door had remained shut since Daddy closed it the morning they found Luci’s letter.
Her knees creaked and popped as she stood from the bed and walked across the room to the closet. She slid open the doors and felt her nostrils sting from the sharp scent of mothballs. Here, in this closet, it was 1975, and even the shadows felt old. All Luci’s clothes hung limp and empty, just like Mama’s and Daddy’s. Like the old suits that Max had left behind when he moved out, and the outgrown dresses that lingered in Emily’s closet when she chose to leave home and move in with her dad.
Patricia fingered Luci’s clothes, slid the hangers down the rod. She reached to the far end of the closet and found Luci’s prom dress: yellow chiffon with spaghetti straps, white daisies embroidered in a hand-flung pattern all over the ruffles. Luci had worn it to Eddie’s senior prom that last spring before she left.
Patricia laid the dress on the bed and it settled there, flat. She unbuttoned her suit coat, shaking her head at herself, stepped out of her skirt and laid her clothes on the bed next to the dress. Then she lifted the dress and slipped it over her head, the chiffon soft and whispery on her skin. She contorted her arms behind herself to slide the zipper up and turned to face the mirror. The dress was short on her, and loose in the waist. She twisted back and forth to set the ruffles to fluttering. The shooshing sound made her smile. She wrapped her arms around herself and was comforted at the solid feel of ribs and hipbones.
The doorbell rang. Patricia caught her breath: Mrs. Hampton. She reached up behind her back to unzip the dress. The zipper slid an inch or two down and then it snagged on a ruffle and stopped moving. She kept tugging at it but it only became more definitively stuck. And now, a flurry of knocking. Patricia cursed, slipped the straps off her shoulders and forced the dress around backwards so she could get at the zipper from the front. More knocking, more insistent, and Patricia freed the zipper, stepped out of the dress and into her suit.
As she was buttoning the jacket and rushing out to the hallway, she heard the lock rattling, as if someone were struggling with it, just like she had. Mrs. Thompson? The moment she reached the landing, the front door surrendered and opened. A rounded blond woman walked in, her peach-colored pantsuit slouchy and wrinkled. She dragged a suitcase in behind her, closed the door and laid a purple leather pocketbook on the chest near the foot of the stairs. When she took off her coat, Patricia knew. She knew the slope of those shoulders, the tilt of that blond head.
Patricia watched from the landing as Luci looked up through heavy blond bangs and gave her a searching smile. Then, in a whisper with a tremble behind it, Luci spoke.
“Can you believe my key still works?” |
