Title: The Arizona Room
Author: Pam Jones
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April Nimitz is recently widowed and is on the road, from Texas to Connecticut, to live with her daughters.
She hopes to escape the multitude of her misdeeds and memories of her life in the hills of Texas, which include her time as a prisoner in an internment camp for German Americans during the second World War.
These memories have, over time, corroded her into someone two-faced, someone who could beam and charm, as well as someone who could degrade and dominate her own children. Before leaving her small town of Himmel Creek for New England, she lashes out one last, and possibly fatal time, and does her best to beam and charm, all the while outrunning her crimes and pushing her daughters farther and farther away. Her only confidante is her husband’s ghost, who reminds her of who she was and what she has done.
ISBN: 978-1-951393-21-2
Price: $14.95 paperback, $4.99 ebook
Praise for The Arizona Room:
“Part Grey Gardens and part Crime and Punishment if John Waters wrote them, Pam Jones’s The Arizona Room is at once a fascinating character study and a rollicking road trip novel. You won’t be able to get April Nimitz’s voice out of your head.”
—Leland Cheuk, author of No Good Very Bad Asian
“Darkly undergirded, but lithe and effervescent with comic notes, Pam Jones’s novel The Arizona Room offers the reader that rare combination of beauty and riveting entertainment. For while Jones has created a compelling and three-dimensional female protagonist, and a motley crew of colorful supporting characters, all driven along a quick and at times rollicking plot line, the real motor (and achievement) of the novel is the nearly pitch-perfect prose style. Economical, precise, concrete, and rhythmical, Jones’s insistent but unobtrusive prose wins the day for The Arizona Room and offers the promise of more from this delightful writer.”
— Salvatore Difalco, author of five books, including The Mountie at Niagara Falls (Anvil Press), Mean Season (Mansfield Press),and Black Rabbit (Anvil Press)
“In her newest novel, The Arizona Room, Pam Jones keeps us tensely tangled in a ball of yarn that is the mind of main character, April. With a jaw-dropping beginning, Jones purposely takes us on an ugly journey and with alarming clarity, lets us know nothing is simple, nothing is right about the wrongs of the past. And just because the mind is going, we are simply not allowed to forget the very bad shit. A true page turner, The Arizona Room offers an outside look at the inside of someone dealing with dementia — and so much more.”
— Peppur Chambers, author of Harlem’s Awakening and Harlem’s Last Dance
“The Arizona Room remains with you long after its final pages. The madness, the depravity, and the tiny slices of joy amongst the horror crawl into your mind and lay down roots. In recounting a lifetime, The Arizona Room moves from an adolescence marred by internment during the Second World War, to the chaotic untangling of threads woven into a lifetime built on deceit. The Arizona Room is a reminder that although family is the tie that binds, it is also a prison whose victims are doomed to continue the tale.”
— William M. Brandon III, author of SILENCE & Selene, The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood, and Welcome to Spring Street
“The Arizona Room is another volume in the increasingly impressive body of work from Pam Jones, one of America’s truly great writers. Here Jones deftly handles time, memory, history, and family dynamics. In The Arizona Room a widowed mother and her daughters struggle against the weight of history and the hard truths of America. Jones’ virtuosity brings compelling depth and humor to tragedy.”
— Jordan A. Rothacker, author of The Pit, and No Other Stories
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