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Synopsis ...
Tuli is a prickly thirteen-year-old who is tired of her mama’s quirky ways, tired of helping with her grammy, and fed up with the boy who follows her around like a puppy. She longs to see her daddy again and dreams of a better, easier life. But what if her dreams actually come true? Will she find the happiness she is looking for? Set in a rural town in Washington in 1986, Tuli is a bittersweet coming-of-age story of sadness and hurt, of hope and the understanding of what true friendships and family are all about. |
Chapter 1 (excerpt) ... In the summer of 1985, my daddy skipped town and left me and my mama to look after Grammy Sal. We managed to scrape by without him. But somewhere along the line, the hole in my heart deepened with an anger so great it had grown thorns and tendrils that reached out to prick anyone who came near me. As an act of defiance, I even took to calling my daddy and mama by their first names, Billy and Jewel. By the next summer, as much as I’d prayed and prayed to see Billy again, he had not shown himself, and I had yet to feel sorry for my miserable acting out. * * * Long before Billy left us, he wedged a pine board in the cradle of our gnarly old tree and tacked up a sign that read Tuli Haskell’s Tree House. Jewel said now that I was thirteen, I was too old for it. But I found it the best place to be whenever something bothered me or whenever I was fed up with the way things were. I liked having my own private space away from Jewel and Grammy Sal. Up here I had a bird’s-eye view of our backyard, everything from the paint chipping off our house to the splintered porch step from the time Mr. Lott, our neighbor, dragged our broken-down clothes dryer outside and left it sitting in a dandelion patch. Up here I could keep an eye out for Billy in case his pickup came wheeling around the corner the way it used to. If I leaned to the right far enough, I could even see who was coming up the sidewalk. |