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.

Deal’s vibrant novel grapples with the aftereffects of trauma on identity. Flo lives in a small apartment in a desert town, having settled there two years after her daughter, Teddy, was released from juvenile detention. The eccentric Flo, a social worker now working in a grocery store, spends her free time with her dog, called Dog, and tending to her neighbor. She’s also grieving after the recent death of a friend and singular ally from the Midwest town where Teddy’s crime occurred, as featured in Deal’s Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories (2023). When Flo receives a letter from Teddy, now 24, with the news that she’s planning a visit, it sends Flo into a spiral of uncertainty made worse by her discovery that Dog is missing. As she sets off in search of Dog and crosses paths with a variety of townspeople, the long walk forces Flo to confront her past, including the fallout from then 14-year-old Teddy’s distressing crime, and consider how to move forward. An engaging, briskly told tale of self-discovery, mother-daughter dynamics, and the complicated bonds of unsettling personal truths.

Leah Strauss, BOOKLIST

Flo is a social worker by training who now works in an upscale grocery store in the American southwest. Her daughter, Teddy, was sentenced to a juvenile detention facility for a violent crime when they were living in northern Illinois; slowly, they are mending the rift that opened between them. Flo feels parental guilt. Teddy is distant. In the meantime, Flo’s dog has escaped her apartment, and she is on a day-long journey to find him. As she walks, she is flooded by memory of Teddy as a child, retells (and amends) the fairy-tale her own mother used to tell to her, and tries to reckon with the recent death of a dear friend who was one of the only people who supported them when Teddy was convicted. Written with emotional depth, The Blue Door is infused with empathy.