Little Jordan - Tapa dura

A young child is found dead on the banks of the Little Jordan river. Someone tries to commit suicide. A teenager runs away from home. LITTLE JORDAN has the weird tension and quiet oddity of a David Lynch film. Told from the perspective of 13-year-old Meg, the town's odd happenings become mysterious and magical. This could be anybody's town, the reader's town. Against the sultry backdrop of a Southern summer, Meg's strange childhood world is eaten away by the caprice of adult relationships, and by the unpredictable tragedies that hang in the valley where she lives.

Told from the perspective of Meg, a precocious thirteen-year-old who is part nymph, part young woman, Little Jordan recounts a series of unusual events - a death, an attempted suicide, a mother's disastrous affair, a young girl's first kiss - that resonate, and finally coalesce, in the reader's mind. Marly Youmans conveys with elegance and economy the unpredictable tragedies and subtle oddities that hover above a small Southern town, one special summer. As you tumble through the smells and sounds of the season - mown hay, wet grass, a search party's flashlights scanning a dark field - you come to realize that this could be your town, an otherwise ordinary town, but one that harbors deep secrets - for even the ordinary teems underneath with strange happenings.