Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

SOPHIE'S HOUSE OF CARDS

Sharon Oard Warner

"Sympathetic characters, a strong sense of place, and a story that lingers long after you've closed the book." (Wally Lamb)

When sixteen?year?old Sophie Granger suspects she’s pregnant, she doesn’t do any of the usual things: She doesn’t buy a pregnancy test nor does she make an appointment at Planned Parenthood, at least not right away. Instead, she digs out her mother’s deck of tarot cards and requests a reading. Is Sophie’s mother, Peggy, really psychic? Is Sophie really pregnant? The answer to both questions is yes. Peggy hasn’t read fortunes since her hippie days in Taos, but she hasn’t forgotten much. As soon as she flips the cards, she sees both her daughter’s predicament and the family crisis that will ensue. But rather than reveal the secret of Sophie’s birth, Peggy scatters the layout and rushes from the room, leaving her daughter to build a literal house of tarot cards. All it will take to bring that house tumbling down is a surprise visit from Peggy’s old friend, Candace. Sharon Oard Warner is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Learning to Dance and Other Stories, and the novel Deep in the Heart. Editions of Deep in the Heart were published in the Netherlands and in Australia and New Zealand. Rebecca Morton and Campbell Scott op? tioned the novel for film. Founding Director of the renowned Taos Summer Writers’ Confer? ence, Warner is a Professor of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

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Book Published 2014-10-01 by University of New Mexico Press

Comments

I finished reading Sophie’s House of Cards and then spent days missing the characters... This novel...is clear-eyed about how the needs of the collective sometime destroy the individual... The inevitable regeneration that takes place is heartbreaking and joyous. This is a wonderful novel.

A deftly woven story textured with beautifully flawed characters who redefine what it means to be a family in an age where love, not blood, connects all creatures—from humans to honeybees. What a charming and deeply compassionate novel.

When I began reading, I couldn't stop because the novel felt like the rhythm of our lives. Sophie's House of Cards gets across the complexity of mother/child relationships and how the mother is fiercely judged in light of them. Warner's effortless and finely crafted storytelling is powerful. I cried after reading it. Now I want the next novel and the next. . . .

Sharon Oard Warner's Sophie's House of Cards is infused with everything I look for in fiction: sympathetic characters whose imperfections are recognizably human, a strong sense of place, and a story that lingers long after you've closed the book and moved on to others, wishing they were as captivating and masterfully told as Warner's novel.

I settled down into this wonder of a novel with great anticipation, and was sad to leave its real-life magic when I got to the end. Refreshingly honest, compulsively readable, and told with charm, heart, and more than a little wisdom, Sophie's House of Cards will make you homesick for your own imperfect family. I miss the Grangers—and their piece of New Mexico—already.