I WISH THIS WAR WERE OVER I WISH THIS WAR WERE OVER, the story of a young woman's journey across the country during wartime, her romance with a soldier whom she meets on the train, and her search for her alcoholic mother, was runner-up for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize and was favorably reviewed in more than forty national and international papers. The New York Times, in a review by Barbara Fisher Williamson, said that the work "is a finely crafted first novel told through the perfectly-pitched voice of 19-year-old Helen Reynolds... The author tells her story with grace and skill" while Ursula Le Guin said it was "very painful, very funny, and full of love." BUY THE BOOK from Booksense, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. EXCERPT This was the first trip I had ever taken by myself and in a way the first major action I had ever performed alone. I wasn't scared exactly, but I was apprehensive I tried to pause at the entrance to the car but the crowd behind me pushed forcefully. the lock on one side of my suitcase popped up. The dusty interior of the railroad car stretched ahead, almost as crowded and confusing as the station had been: green plush, chipped beige walls, ornate ironware light fixtures hanging cockeyed, an aisle full of khaki backs, shoulders, buttocks, duffel bags—every seat taken. I moved slowly, hoping something would happen. I couldn't see the person who grabbed me and pulled me by the coat sleeve, because my suitcase was between us. A man, I knew that by the khaki knee. He tugged me past him into a window seat which he had been saving with his briefcase. He scooped this out from under me and stood up to put my suitcase in the overhead rack. While he was doing that I looked at him. He was someone I knew. He was an old boyfriend of my mother's. I WISH THIS WAR WERE OVER was translated into six languages and was published in large-type, Braille and audio editions. THE BRIDE WHO RAN AWAY THE BRIDE WHO RAN AWAY, published by Atheneum in 1988, tells the story of Grace Dowell, a Northern California impoverished heiress, who runs away to escape her handsome, manipulative cousin, to whom she is engaged. At the same time she wants to escape her eccentric Utopian community. The London Guardian described the book as "excruciatingly good," while The List said, "You will be enchanted with this saga of a young girl—who, like an icicle slowly melting and forming a pond of water, flows with new-found freedom." BUY THE BOOK from Booksense, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. EXCERPT I got up in the middle of the night and started to prowl. What are you looking for, Grace? I liked to talk to myself. Nothing. I'm looking for IT. Define IT. The Answer. To all my questions. You're old enough to know there's no Answer. I was nineteen and I did, too, think there was an Answer. I went out into the hall and down the stairs with the carved railing, pausing on the landing to look at the room Sybil sometimes used. Tonight, Sybil had gone out to the diggings to sleep in her car; the back seat had been made into a bed; Sybil opened the door and filed herself into the hot plush and quilt arrangement like a letter sliding into its envelope. The Dowells were rich and crazy and lived in French Ford because they once had ideas about an American Western Utopia. My father was a third-generation French Ford Dowell. THE BRIDE WHO RAN AWAY was translated into French, Germen and Italian and was published in large-print and audio editions.