Product Description
Tara Marconi has made her way to “The Rock,” a remote island in Alaska governed by the seasons and the demands of the world of commercial fishing. She hasn’t felt at home in a long while — her mother's death left her unmoored and created a seemingly insurmountable rift between her and her father. But in the majestic, mysterious, and tough boundary-lands of Alaska she begins to work her way up the fishing ladder from hatchery assistant all the way to King crabber. Tara learned discipline from years as a young boxer in Philly, but here she learns anew what it means to work, to connect, and—in buying and fixing up an old tugboat—how to make a home she knows is her own.
Reviews/Praise
"This is a truly towering debut novel. Brendan Jones charts new novelistic territory and sends back moving dispatches from the frontiers of the human heart." —Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son
"There are the easy journeys, the ones that take us where we mean to travel, and there are those we shy from, the dark and uncertain treks of the soul. Without flinching, nineteen-year-old Tara ventures from South Philly to the male-dominated Rock, an island off the coast of Alaska. True to her boxer instincts, Tara comes out swinging, unsure what the island will make of her. As layers of her former life wash away, she proves as raw and tender as the landscape, as striking and unforgettable. A promising debut, true to the core a novel of grit and redemption." —Deb Vanasse, author of Cold Spell and Out of the Wilderness
"The Alaskan Laundry is a novel of bracing air that gets deep into your lungs. As Tara Marconi reinvents herself in Alaska, we see all facets of the American dream of self-reliance and boundless possibility play out on the stage of the Last Frontier. A strong, singular person grows in these pages. Like a protagonist in a Daniel Woodrell novel, she is stubborn, heroic, and capable of anything." —Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
"A fresh voice in contemporary realism arrives on the scene in this coming-of-age novel. Fierce and flawed, protagonist Tara Marconi leaves the Lower 48 behind to cut her teeth on the Alaskan wilderness, searching for salvation in the notion that 'people come to Alaska to wash themselves clean.' Jones's dynamic love of America's last frontier comes through in spare, gripping prose." —Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist