Stiff Hearts

Stiff Hearts By: Jo Deniau Jo Deniau’s debut novel is based on the adventures and mishaps of her mother in mid-1950s Greenwich Village. At the end of twenty-year-old Gillian Rysert’s train journey from St. Louis to New York City in 1949, she believes she’s escaped her hillbilly mother’s legacy: some extreme physical code or language of survival transmitted by the blow of a fist on someone’s jaw or a gun firing far away in the woods. Magnetized to violence by her mother and bereft of her father, Gillian no longer lets love in. So far, Gillian’s reserve has shielded her - from anyone who is not her late father. But now Gillian’s surrounded by other Greenwich Village incomers suffering the aftermath of two World Wars and, like the penetrative reach of stained glass, they embolden her stiff heart to open. Among them: Latvian freedom fighter Janis Dievinš, Latina sophisticate Dolores Valencia, and the boas and pearls proprietor of Levitsky’s Treasure Trove. Authentic relationship with these characters packs some risks though. Gillian could become collateral damage of her lover’s anti-Communist mission, destroy herself before she can stand fully in her power, and perish in the trap her mother sets for her back in Missouri.

• | Author: Jo Deniau
• | Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
• | Publication Date: July 28, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 282 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1637641532
• | ISBN-13: 9781637641538