Rainey Royal

Greenwich Village, 1970s. Rainey Royal—fourteen years old,talented, and troubled—lives in a once-elegant, now decaying brownstone withher father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality. Her mother hasabandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father’s bestfriend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build asubstitute family. She’s a rebel, even a criminal, but she’s also deeplyvulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries herlife has knocked down and, more than that, struggling to learn how to be anartist and a person in a broken world.

Rainey Royal is told in fourteen narratives ofscarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel: theharrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.