Angielski
Maggie Scratch
Ages 12 and up.
For readers who love edgy, reflective, coming of age stories, set off the grid in the seventies on the island of Ibiza with Maggie's clueless humor warding off loneliness and longing.
Maggie Scratch is the real thing...based on the real life of an exile.
It's 1979. Ibiza.
"Some people, and my father is probably one, identify Izzy and me with the bumper sticker 'America, love it or leave it!' It's true, we left, but we didn't mean to stay here. We were only planning to come for six months. I've banished myself from America, I'm an exile!"
Soundtrack mix includes: Simon and Garfunkel, Dire Straits, The Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Charlie Mingus, Pink Floyd, Roberta Flack, Elvis Presley...
Growing up in the sixties in Elkins Park, Pa., Maggie finds adventure in Ibiza as an off-beat newspaper reporter. "Words fly by me faster than I can pin them down." Her life is at loose ends. She wants to get pregnant, but she doesn't want to separate from Izzy, her partner, the charismatic artist, just because he has a vasectomy. "All I need is semen." Her best friend Seneca Stone sums her up, "Maggie Scratch searching for seeds." A surprise opportunity arises when Maggie meets an Ibicenco neighbor in the forest. Was he meant to be her stud? She hears the voice of Nanny Scratch, "It was meant to be!"
Or was it?
Reviews
"Maggie Scratch, the central character, explores relationships and all their foibles, across the years and across continents, before finally settling in Ibiza...What is fueling her restlessness... Of course, the answer is not an easy one, she wants a child - and one can imagine what follows, in light of the fact this part of the book is based in Ibiza, island of 'anything goes'..."
-Cat Milton, Ibiza Spotlight magazine
"Dreamy, sensuous and evocative: 'In the late evening, the earth cools down so loud I can hear it crack.' Maggie Scratch is filled with beautiful, contrasting images and situations. It is a synesthetic journey, a portrait of a time, of the people she finds while she builds and searches for her identity. A really powerful book!"
-Gabriela Nadal, Barcelonogy
"The book is a psychological jigsaw puzzle. While fitting the pieces together and fantasizing about how she will get pregnant, a surprise piece falls in Maggie's lap. Destiny? Or, Maggie wonders, are the pieces meant to be?"
-Barcelona Metropolitan
"Maggie's roller-coaster narrative goes down easy in Gross' clean and elegant prose. The book opens in the front seat of a Corvair, a signpost of what's to come: the reader is instantly passenger in a car that speeds, skids, halts, crashes and coasts along familiar and foreign roads. Whether Maggie reminds you of yourself, your mother, or someone you once saw, she is rendered with an openness and a tenderness that makes her as compelling and accessible as kin."
-Winter Miller, playwright, In Darfur
"The people she knows-family, friends and acquaintances-all seem familiar; the places where she visits and lives make us want to go there too. I hope there will be more from Maggie. I smell a series here."
-Verified Amazon Customer Review
"What I love about this book is Maggie. She's so frank, so real, so homey, it's like sitting at your kitchen table with a friend. She talks to you. She's a voice. I share her cluelessness and her quirky ideas, her voice is like an echo."
-Verified Amazon Customer Review
