In an ascending order, of sorts: 

10. You like to feel so deeply embedded in a place like Northwest Florida that your skin sweats mosquitos and fried fish and sun sinking into the bay. 

9. You live to read about someone who desperately wants to rise above her circumstances by a writer like Pat Spears, who knows every inch of human longing. 

8. You really care about all the ways there are to love and to be loved by flawed, precious, exasperating  

 humans. 

7. You really love a heroine who cusses, and drinks whiskey, lies, steals, and loves so deeply you can feel her teeth ache with longing. Jodie Taylor is her name, and she will live right in between your breaths as you read this book. 

6. You can’t get enough of exquisitely fashioned sentences that make your heart leap. I could give you examples, but one can’t copy nearly the whole book here. 

5. Thinking about why the world is, in all its sorry, glorious variety, is something you crave, and you leap at the chance to read a writer who makes you think.

4. You are, or know someone who is, “peculiar,” and you long to understand their/your world better. 

3. You have waited years to find another book that does not assume that LGBT is an identity that should only concern those who live within its circle. Yes, that rare.

2. You want to watch a writer transcend good to greatness. If you read Spears’ first published novel, Dream Chaser, and thought it was great, now watch her hit the stratosphere. 

1. You have a spot on your bookshelf waiting for a novel that truly inspires. 

Yes, I’m not kidding, this is Spears stepping up to a dais of writers who can deal with hard truths by wringing our hearts out, then showing us a glimmer of hope. Dorothy Allison comes to mind, Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison–, oh, just go order it. Now, before it sells out and you have to wait for the next printing. Because it will. Oh, yes, it will. 

Order it at Twisted Road Publications