Little Miss Strange

Sarajean Henry is a child of love children. She's perfectly at home in a place where there are no real "homes," no last names, and no commitments to the future - the free-love, hippie world of 1970s Denver. The story she tells achieves its beauty - and its power - through details that offer a startlingly unfiltered view of an exotic counterculture. The story begins when Sarajean is a preschooler living with Jimmy Henry, a Vietnam vet she accepts as her father. Whoever her mother might have been, she disappeared long ago. Sarajean successfully scams and scavenges her way through childhood, overcoming such obstacles as Jimmy Henry's heroin habit and having Miss Rinaldi, the Queen Bitch of Homework, for third grade. By age five, she's finding her own way to the "free school;" by age ten, she's smoking pot. By the time she comes of age, she's seen enough sex and violence to last a lifetime. Sarajean sees her world exactly as it is, but doesn't judge it. She waits. She watches. She listens. And, from carelessly discarded clues, she knits together the identity she craves in much the same way she acquires new "rags" in which to dress each newly discovered aspect of her maturing self. Told in a voice as clear and true as sunlight, this is a classic novel about the resilience of the human spirit. In Sarajean Henry, a girl who understands what "family" really means and where to find it, Joanna Rose has created an invincible and unforgettable character. She has, at the same time, evoked a tumultuous American era and explained how we lived through it.