Barefoot Girls by Tara McTiernan
Author's Website
When her hometown newspaper reviews Hannah O’Brien’s newly released novel, the nature of her book is called into question when the reviewer suggests it is a memoir depicting her neglectful alcoholic mother – Keeley O’Brien Cohen, the most beloved of the Barefoot Girls - a little too accurately for fiction, citing rumors rather than sources.
Deeply hurt and betrayed, Keeley cuts Hannah out of her life. Desperate, Hannah does everything she can to apologize and explain, but her pleas fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the rest of Hannah’s life starts to unravel, pushing her to risk her engagement to Daniel, the one man who had been able to scale the high walls around her heart. At the eleventh hour, the Barefoot Girls are able to convince Keeley to send Hannah the keys to the Barefooter house, the home and heart of their friendship. Barred from their clubhouse since she was twelve, Hannah grabs the chance to visit the little shack filled with memories and perched at the tip of Captain’s Island in the Great South Bay on Long Island, New York.
As Hannah battles to come to terms with her equally blessed and troubled childhood and understand her mother and her sister-close friends, she’s confronted with the power of forgiveness and the dangers of holding on to the past.
About the Author
A voracious reader known to complete a book in a single sitting, Tara McTiernan grew up in Riverside, Connecticut where the librarians learned that she had a terrible addiction to certain books - re-reading them and continually checking them out until her parents had to be called in and limits set to the number of times she was allowed to take out a book. "Other children would like to have a chance to read this book, too," she was told to her great consternation. To this day, there are certain books Tara will not lend out to others as she has to have them on hand at all times.Around the same time as the library-lending--debacle, Tara started writing and found her true calling. The only problem was that she was told that, unless she was ridiculously lucky along the lines of a lottery winner, she would never make a living as a writer. So, she dabbled in various careers, never finding her way back until her forties, when she became obstreperous about her writing, refusing to back down again. The result is her novel, Barefoot Girls, as well as several published short stories in literary magazines. She currently resides in North Carolina with her husband, Ash, and their collection of dog-eared books. For more on Tara and her writing, visit her blog at http://taramctiernanfiction.blogspot.com/
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