Single mom opens her own closet to the past to help her daughter understand about the murder of her high school friend and the importance of all her choices in life.
Great Falls, Virginia!
Dusty Rose’s past finally catches up with her on the eve of her daughter Ginny’s high school graduation.
Drugs, sex, rock and roll and even a Christian cult, a subdued part of Dusty's history since Ginny came along, becomes a mandatory tale to be told when Ginny’s close friend Roberta is murdered by her boyfriend.
What begins as a letter to her daughter becomes a book-length 90’s cautionary tale to Ginny about Dusty’s youth in the 70’s. In it Dusty shares the wild times and misadventures of what can happen to young women who trade "belonging” to a guy for the dreams they hoped to have come true – as in Roberta’s case and, once upon a time, very nearly Dusty’s.
In rediscovering the book in a storage box, Dusty gives Virginia a ‘heads up’ that maybe it’s time to pass it on to her granddaughter Shelly who has just come of age and is ready to launch into Life.
Reflections on "Great Falls, Virginia!”
Eventually each of us is revisited by our youthful choices.
For those whose choices were made wisely or with intellectual forethought, most likely your paths led to a successful future or at least a manageable outcome.
For those like myself who made choices based on emotions and need, the outcomes were not always as brilliant and, even though life has a way of straightening itself out, that rough patch of “emo” always remains a percolating part of one’s past.
This is the true fiction version of my young adult patch of “emo” and how it played forward when my daughter’s friend tragically fell victim through the same kind of choices – and my realizing how once upon a time, it could have just as easily been me.
Kristi Koons
Excerpt
CHAPTER I
Dear Ginny,
Writing you this letter is something I’ve always planned on doing. But now –I can’t believe what happened to Roberta on the eve of high school graduation.
Your classmate and friend is now tragically gone just because she trusted the wrong guy. Maybe I don’t need to write this letter now, but here goes anyway.
You know, it’s real easy when you don’t know the victim to make a judgment call on her life. I think about the people who picked up the newspaper this morning, or watched the
gruesome postscript to Roberta’s life televised from that tacky motel room last night. To them it probably seemed like a simple case of a sleazy teen “getting what she asked for.”
But you and I do know the victim. We know what drove Roberta to go to that motel room, the kind of isolation and
loneliness that compelled her to go. How the chance to belong and feel loved felt worth the risk she took with someone she knew so briefly. It reminds me of someone I used to know –
me.
Obviously, I survived this phase of my life. But not without consequence, and not without some valuable knowledge to
pass along to you. And you’d better listen, Ginny. There’s a big difference between then in the 60’s and 70’s, and now going into the 90’s. There is no longer any margin for error.
Look around you. Think about all your friends. How many of them got their emotional needs met at home? How many are ready to take part in the world with a healthy, complete soul?
Now think of these friends as strangers, no longer bound by peer pressure or daily behavior checks at home and at school,and you’ll know why you should always take care.
Back in the 60’s if you brought home a stray guy, it was rare that you had more to worry about than a ravaged refrigerator or maybe a case of V.D. Well, except for maybe a Manson
family follower but they were the exceptions, not the rule.
As you know Life has upped the ante, and that stray you bring home today could be the AIDS poster boy or the guy Roberta met.
Of course, the odds are still good that you could also meet someone like your dad, which would be a dangerously close second.
Yes Virginia, your dad was the personification of what
all mothers warn their daughters about. So pay attention! This
is your mother speaking.
What causes America's mainstream media to fear and try to destroy a group of artists and their work? What happens when such a creative movement grows in strength and threatens media's bottom line? Why would extremists find it necessary to take acti
In this eccentric tale set in a small town in northern India, Pawan Mishra masterfully weaves ingenuity and sarcasm in a manner that’s simultaneously hilarious and tragic.
3 WAY MIRROR is about a lost identity as experienced by a twenty-eight-year old who thinks he's Charles Randall, until strange events suggest otherwise.
