Driving with her Dad to visit Aunt May is his idea of how to help Tina out of a depression that’s lasted months. But the highway is boring, the weather is hot, and she’s seen enough rocks and sticks for a lifetime. Tina is so preoccupied with her thoughts and memories that she hardly sees the world changing around her. When Tina and her Dad stop in a small town that hasn’t changed much since 1918, it’s a chance for her thoughts and memories to shuffle into an order that might make a little more sense.

New from Doublejoy Books is the short novel Plum Tree, a story of transition from place to place and time to time. There’s no fanfare or surprise when Tina meets young Tim, who lost his mother to the Spanish flu. As she shifts from childhood to youth, from present to past and future, she’s thinking of how to connect her music with people. As Tina says, Local stories. There could be a lot of them, especially if you didn’t need them to be about guns and crimes but maybe about sports or inventing things. Or just ordinary life but as if it counted.