photo credit: Adam Tetzloff
Amy Shearn’s work has appeared in Jane Magazine, West Branch, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She was born in Evanston and graduated from Highland Park High School and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. Amy Shearn has published poetry, short stories and non-fiction – see her website for a current listing of publications.
This description of her first novel, How Far Is the Ocean From Here, is from Booklist:
Susannah Prue is a timid bookstore employee mere weeks away from giving birth when she impulsively flees from Chicago to a dilapidated motel somewhere near the Texas–New Mexico desert border. Holed up in the isolated Thunder Lodge, introspective Susannah’s life becomes entwined with the motel’s elderly proprietors, Char and Marlon; their handsome, mentally disabled teenage son, Tim; and the more offbeat guests, especially Dicey, who is on her way to Arizona with her seven-year-old niece, a sexually confused child named Frankie. What Susannah hides from her newfound acquaintances is that she is a surrogate mother for an affluent couple left behind in Chicago, the conflicted Julian Forsythe and his wife, Kit, a sharp, stereotypical matriarch. As Susannah’s secret is gradually uncovered, she runs away again—her sights set on the ocean—this time in the company of young Frankie and an unstable Tim. Although the novel’s dramatic climax and moments of shifting perspectives feel hurried, Shearn’s otherwise thoughtful debut is a charismatic and provocative tale of intersecting lives and unexpected companionship.
–Leah Strauss
