How does a librarian from New Jersey end up in a convenience store on Vancouver Island in the middle of the night, playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest? She gets married to the wrong man for starters—she didn’t know he was “that kind of Catholic”—and ends up in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She gets a job in a New Age bookstore, wanders toward Buddhism without realizing it, and acquires a dog. Things get complicated after that. Pattianne Anthony is less a thinker than a dreamer, and she finds out the hard way that she doesn’t want a husband, much less a baby, and that getting out of a marriage is a lot harder than getting into it, especially when the landscape of the west becomes the voice of reason. A Small Crowd of Strangers, Joanna Rose’s second novel, is part love story, part slightly sideways spiritual journey.
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“An important meditation on how our supposed missteps often create as much life as they destroy, Pattianne’s final destination rewards the reader as much as it does the character.”
— Michelle Ruiz Keil, author of All of Us With Wings
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Joanna Rose is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange, which earned the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays and her other work has appeared in numerous publications. She is an Atheneum Fellow in Poetry, co-hosts the prose critique group Pinewood Table, and works with youth through Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools and with Young Musicians & Artists.
Mia Gaskin, originally from Southern California, earned a degree in theater from UC San Diego, and has performed professionally both on stage as well as in independent film. She now lives in Oregon with her husband and very handsome Golden Retriever and has narrated over one hundred titles from her state-of-the-art home studio.