Greenwich Village, 1970s. Rainey Royal—fourteen years old, talented, and troubled—lives in a once-elegant, now decaying brownstone with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father's best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She's a rebel, even a criminal, but she's also deeply vulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down and, more than that, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.
Rainey Royal is told in fourteen narratives of scarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel: the harrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.
Dylan Landis is the author of Normal People Don’t Live like This, a work of fiction that made it onto Newsday’s “10 Favorite Books of 2009” and More magazine’s “100 Books Every Woman Must Read.” She received a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, and her work has appeared in Tin House, Bomb, House Beautiful, and the New York Times. In a past life she wrote six books on interior design.
Jorjeana Marie has narrated over seventy audiobooks, performed in hundreds of commercials, and starred in the pilot Listen to Grandpa, Andy Ling with Elliott Gould. She is a stand-up comic who has opened for Richard Lewis, Louie Anderson, and Kathleen Madigan. Her video game credits include Final Fantasy, Crackdown 2, and Star Guardians. She loves reading so much it gets her into trouble.