The Blue Door

How much responsibility and guilt can a mother bear for a child who has done wrong?

This is the question that haunts Flo when her daughter Teddy plans to visit after a long separation. The prospect of seeing Teddy brings back painful memories of Teddy’s troubled past—a young teen imprisoned for committing murder. Can Flo find the strength to support or even cope with her daughter as she is now? Can she resurrect hope for either of them?

Flo must thrash through these questions alone; her dear friend and confidant has just died. Then, as she's grappling with grief and guilt, her dog goes missing, and she takes a long walk to find him. On the surface, this is all that happens: A simple walk through a desert town. Encounters with people who uplift or unsettle her along the way. But for Flo, this journey becomes much more—a personal odyssey, as profound and disorienting as Ulysses’. She remembers an old folktale passed down by her family, about a young woman’s mythical journey to find her place in the world. Echoes of this tale play through the current story, and the hunt for Dog turns into a metaphysical search for meaning.

Some readers will remember Flo and Teddy from Strange Attractors, the outstanding collection that critics compared to Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor. As her sequel to the mother-daughter story unfolds, Janice Deal once more reveals the extraordinary depths of unpretentious people. The Blue Door is a radical adventure, both compulsively readable and meditative—a rare combination.

Janice Deal is the author of a novel, THE SOUND OF RABBITS, and a previous story collection, THE DECLINE OF PIGEONS. The former placed as a finalist for both the Many Voices Project annual competition and the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize. THE DECLINE OF PIGEONS was a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Stories from her new collection, STRANGE ATTRACTORS, have won THE MOTH Short Story Prize and the CAGIBI Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose. She lives in the Chicago area.