The Divining Season (Paperback or Softback)

“Girls appear and disappear, but so do women. We know this because blood talks to blood.”

The town of Larissa, Texas, has secrets. Native girls are going missing, decades-old conflicts are hiding just below the surface, and Emily Howard is speaking to her ancestors. At eleven years old, the peculiar Emily does not fit in. It might be her bizarre fear of doorways, or the strange illnesses that plague her, or the obvious fact that she is not a blood relative of her mother. Regardless, Emily’s arrival to Larissa, Texas, changes the search for the missing children and the way the women of Larissa relate to each other. A story wrought with the griefs of womanhood, the burdens of ancestral trauma, and the realities of indigeneity in the United States, The Divining Season follows as the community of Larissa reels with its profound losses and Emily discovers where in this tangled world of the living, the dead, and the missing that she fits in.

Gwendolyn Paradice is a queer, disabled, Cherokee-Caucasian writer of fiction and nonfiction. A 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, they’re also the author of the Hudson Prize winning short story collection More Enduring for Having Been Broken (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) as well as a chapbook co-authored with poet Kara Dorris, Carnival Bound (or, Please Unwrap Me) (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Their creative work has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net, and their short stories and essays can be found in Booth, Zone 3, Crab Orchard Review, Tin House Online, The Journal of America Folklore, and others. They retain a PhD from The University of Missouri, an MFA from Bennington College, and MA and BA degrees from the University of North Texas, north of Dallas, where they were born and raised.