Synopsis "Of Love and Sound Mind: - A Short Story Collection (in English)"
The Of Love and Sound Mind short story collection brings us into the lives of wounded women and girls as they try to reconcile the collateral damage of mental illness, the psychic traumas of divorce, the makeup of hallucination, the echoes of unanswered grief, the crippling violence of family secrets and the trauma of embedded racism. In What Happened, an eight year old girl bears frightened witness to her mother's first psychotic break. In Things Happen, there's been an accident and Stella has to get to her husband. The problem? Stella's mother is damn crazy and her psychotic, stinking, nasty, bra-less, hoarding and hallucinating ways are standing between Stella and the man she loves more than life. In Mourning In The Sun, Mia is in deep and impenetrable mourning. Months after unspeakable tragedy she hides away in her home so that she can be alone with the echoes of her dead husband's footsteps and her mother's whispered endearments. In Crowded, Lena is a brilliant PhD candidate. She is also a self-medicating paranoid schizophrenic who must contend with tormenting visions of her long dead twin brother. In Of Love and Sound Mind, Candace is barely holding it together. Now, Child Protective Services has stomped into her life and if she wants them out she must agree to their terms. In Moore Women, cousins Jess, Callie and Yvonne were raised together in the same house by their grandmother. Then at seventeen, Jess leaves home, broken and bearing the weight of an unfinished story. Now twenty years later, one of the cousins experiences a mental breakdown so profound she must be hospitalized. Can Callie, Jess and Yvonne get past their pain and broken hearts to help and heal each other? In Sistren, Amira and Madelynn are half-sisters, one white, one black, whose father has died. Now Amira, the executor of their father's will must manage the distribution of his assets. The problem though, is that Madelynn never knew their father. In fact, all of her life she has believed her mother's husband to be her father. Now both women must manage the collateral damage of their parents' lies and choices. In By Grace, it is 1950 in Macon, Alabama and a little baby girl is born dying. Now her parents must defy the murderous rampages of the Jim Crow south to save their child's life. In Eulogy, Cynthia has been dead for almost fourteen years. Now as the grief and guilt lift, her daughter shares the life lesson her mother tried so hard to impart to her and make peace with the mental illness that made her mother unable to care for her.
