1eclecticwriter

Hard economic times are forcing adult children to return to live with their parents. Very few like this reality. Sylvie Granger is no exception. Bitter, resentful and ill, she returns to her mother’s ranch, bringing along her ten year old daughter Kim, but no husband and no prospects. Kim is excited to explore a new home, and to meet her grandmother, whom she is severely instructed, by Sylvie, to refer to as Mam. Esther Granger is welcoming to her daughter, but aware that Sylvie’s hostility will stir up old tensions, including Esther’s ambivalent feelings about the husband who left her, and the ranch manager whose steady support has enabled her to start turning a profit from her land.

Set against a drought-stricken southwestern landscape, with the ever present threat of wild fire, “Like Dust Devils Through a Card House” reveals the complexities of character and relationship which arise when caring people make flawed decisions about “what is best” for one another. Kim is determined to create, at the ranch, the sense of family and “a place to belong” for which she yearns. Her actions heighten Sylvie’s conflicting needs to cling to anger and blame-casting, but also to begin building a life for herself and her daughter. Esther, meanwhile, is challenged to achieve release from long-held pain, in order to help her family. How do these three strong women, and the men whose lives intertwine with theirs, respond to drought, wildfire and the sparks ignited from their conflicting desires?

Niki Sebastian’s new novel is rooted in her experiences living for forty years in the rural northern New Mexico she loves. Her short stories have won awards in Southwest Writer’s and Writer’s Digest contests, and her essays and non-fiction articles have been published in Psychology Today, New Mexico Magazine, local and regional newspapers, and on-line in Happenstance, and Happenstance Literary. She is currently at work on a book of creative self-management strategies drawn from interviews with people living with Parkinson’s Disease; on a new crop of short stories for both print and on-line magazines; and on a mystery novel set in Saigon in the mid-1950s.