WHEN YOUR MOTHER DOESN'T

WHEN YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T follows a reluctant family reunion and the forty year of secrets that have kept apart a mother who could not love her daughters and her daughters who have struggled to love themselves.

In late August, Frankie Ashby sets off from Portland to visit her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty-eight years, not since Lola left teenage Frankie and her sister Callie without warning. At a rest stop as night falls, an elderly woman abandons a young boy to Frankie’s care with vague information about returning him to his family in Montana, setting off a series of decisions that will change Frankie’s life. Interwoven into the tensions of the reunion with Lola and Callie and the uncovering of the boy’s circumstances are the pasts of the three women: introverted Frankie spending her life looking for connection, extroverted Callie disdaining love and embracing fame, and enigmatic Lola, whose secrets and losses lie at the heart of it all. Jill Kelly’s first book (The Fog of Dead Souls; Skyhorse) was a thriller. This is more general/women's fiction and it reflects the lives/relationship between a mother and her daughters. The main characters are strong women and are all easily relatable, regardless of whether the reader is a homebody, a hippie, a model, or anything else she will be able to see a bit of herself in each of these women. About Jill Kelly: I've always been in love with words and sentences. The first books I remember reading came from the Airstream bookmobile that traveled once a week to the general store in rural Skamania, Washington. The first stories I wrote (at age 9) were in a spiral notebook and illustrated with magazine cut-outs. I still have those notebooks! I started writing in a women's group in 2000 with friends. Eventually the group disbanded although two of us wrote memoirs and published them. My memoir, Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman, was a finalist for a 2008 Oregon Book Award in literary excellence. I've been touring around the country since then offering writing workshops and retreats. I wrote my first novel in 2009 and recently published it. It started with a 10-minute writing with a prompt, "witnessing the creation," and grew into an unconventional romance with a second-rate painter as the unlikely hero. The Color of Longing is now available on amazon and kindle. I've also written a how-to book, Sober Play: Using Creativity for a More Joyful Recovery. It's a collection of a lot of my ideas on how becoming a writer and a painter has made my own sobriety more meaningful and joyful.