Julia Fierro's Blog: Author of The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth

Booklist gives The Gypsy Moth Summer a **STARRED REVIEW**
"[Fierro] succeeds in creating a suspenseful, richly symbolic drama and coming-of-age story. Poignant, raw, and, at times, brutally honest about the poison concealed behind the charming facade of a quaint community, this is an intense and meaningful read."

Grateful to bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult for the following advance praise of The Gypsy Moth Summer:
"THE GYPSY MOTH SUMMER plunges the reader into a hazy, hot daydream of hidden truth, scandal, and racial prejudice. With bold strokes, Julia Fierro creates a vivid world where privilege and class are merely a veneer to distract from the cracks beneath the surface." -- Jodi Picoult, NYT bestselling author of SMALL GREAT THINGS and LEAVING TIME

Only 1 day left to get an advanced copy of The Gypsy Moth Summer in a Goodreads giveaway!

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Galleys just hatched and St. Martin's Press is giving away 100 advance copies of my new novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer, over at Goodreads out June 6th.

Get a copy of The Gypsy Moth Summer in a Goodreads giveaway.

Galleys just hatched and St. Martin's Press is giving away 100 advance copies of my new novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer, over at Goodreads out June 6th.

Grateful for generous advance praise from Francine Prose, Amy Bloom, Matthew Thomas, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Caroline Leavitt, Joanna Rakoff, and more, and pre-publication press via Huffington Post, The Millions, Nylon, The Week and more.

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2017
The Huffington Post: 2017 Book Preview: 33 Titles To Add To Your Shelf
The Week: 28 books to read in 2017
The Millions: The Great 2017 Book Preview
Nylon Magazine: 50 Books We Can’t Wait To Read In 2017
Read It Forward: 17 Books We’re Excited to Read in 2017

“A hugely engaging novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer is a sterling example of how fiction can entertain us and at the same time inspire us to think about the things we urgently need to consider, now more than ever.”
– Francine Prose, bestselling author of Reading Like A Writer and Mister Monkey

“The Gypsy Moth Summer shakes and stirs family saga and summer romance upside down. The irresistible story-telling brings to life each character and Fierro doesn’t just observe, she knows. Like all great novelists, she gives us the world.”
– Amy Bloom, bestselling author of bestselling novels Away and Lucky Us

“Julia Fierro’s marvelous THE GYPSY MOTH SUMMER is a novel to slowly savor, settling in with her characters as you would old friends, cherishing every sentence, every turn of plot. Rarely does one encounter a novel this entertaining, which also speaks to the complicated truths about race and class at the heart of our country’s tangled history.”
– Joanna Rakoff, author of The Salinger Year

“The Gypsy Moth Summer gathers all of life in its wonderfully confident reach: the buzzing energy of youth, the fraught hope of adulthood, the remorseless clarity of old age. Fierro’s thoroughly entertaining storytelling doesn’t prevent her from taking on weighty subjects like race and class in America. The pages fly by as the book hurtles toward its devastating conclusion.”
—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

“Masterpiece is often a word that is casually tossed around, but it fits Fierro’s work, which is so richly alive, so poetic, it is truly Shakespearean tragedy. I had a sense of wonder that someone could craft a novel as perfect as this one.”
– Caroline Leavitt, author of the bestselling novels Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow, and Cruel Beautiful World

“Julia Fierro’s second book is a luminous, urgent novel about the forces that shape us all: where we grow up; whether we are loved by our parents or understood by our peers; how class, power, and money may cast our fates. I rooted for the lovers at the thrumming heart of The Gypsy Moth Summer with the hungry turn of every page.”
– Sophie McManus, author of The Unfortunates

“The Gypsy Moth Summer is a deeply satisfying tale of family, first love, and home. The world of Avalon Island is lush, inviting, and deeply complicated, full of the same contradictions that we grapple with day to day. It’s a meditation on what makes a community and a reminder that the past is never past and home is a place that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.”
– Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman

“Julia Fierro weaves a riveting, tragic novel of place from an Island’s unspoken past. Vividly drawn characters and startling scenes of joy, confrontation and regret are set against the surreal background of Gypsy Moths devouring trees, Clinton-era racial tensions, a deeply ingrained military industrial complex, and the conflicted societal and familial need to belong at all costs. Fierro’s masterful second novel draws us close, makes us its confidante, and then delivers hard and violent truths about the Island’s legacy of denial.”
– Scott Blackwood, author of PEN USA 2016 award winning novel, See How Small

SYNOPSIS:
It is the summer of 1992 and a gypsy moth invasion blankets Avalon Island. Ravenous caterpillars disrupt early summer serenity on Avalon, an islet off the coast of Long Island--dropping onto novels left open on picnic blankets, crawling across the T-shirts of children playing games of tag and capture the flag in the island's leafy woods. The caterpillars become a relentless topic of island conversation and the inescapable soundtrack of the season.

It is also the summer Leslie Day Marshall—only daughter of Avalon’s most prominent family—returns with her husband, a botanist, and their children to live in “The Castle,” the island's grandest estate. Leslie’s husband Jules is African-American, and their children bi-racial, and islanders from both sides of the tracks form fast and dangerous opinions about the new arrivals.

Maddie Pencott LaRosa straddles those tracks: a teen queen with roots in the tony precincts of East Avalon and the crowded working class corner of West Avalon, home to Grudder Aviation factory, the island's bread-and-butter and birthplace of generations of bombers and war machines. Maddie falls in love with Brooks, Leslie’s and Jules’ son, and that love feels as urgent to Maddie as the questions about the new and deadly cancers showing up across the island. Could Grudder Aviation, the pride of the island—and its patriarch, the Colonel—be to blame?

As the gypsy moths burst from cocoons in flocks that seem to eclipse the sun, Maddie’s and Brooks’ passion for each other grows and she begins planning a life for them off Avalon Island.

Vivid with young lovers, gangs of anxious outsiders; a plotting aged matriarch and her husband, a demented military patriarch; and a troubled young boy, each seeking his or her own refuge, escape and revenge, THE GYPSY MOTH SUMMER is about love, gaps in understanding, and the struggle to connect: within families; among friends; between neighbors and entire generations.

So thrilled to celebrate the publication of Cutting Teeth TONIGHT at BookCourt at 7pm.
If you are in NYC, join us for food, drinks, candy from the Sugar Shop and a brief reading and book signing.
http://bookcourt.com/

Thank you to everyone who helped Cutting Teeth make its way into the hands and hearts of readers.

Warmly, and gratefully,
Julia

Today at the OMG! All the Books! Giveaway, you can win a signed copy of CUTTING TEETH!
Plus, if you enter today, you're automatically entered to win a box of 24 books (books by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, Emma Straub, Courtney Maum, Mira Jacob, Marie-Helene Bertino, Megan Abbott, plus more of the spring/summer's most anticipated books). A ridiculous amount of books, all signed.
This is your second-to-last chance to do so (the giveaway ends tomorrow)!

http://mirandabw.com/juliafierro/

Huge thanks to Miranda Beverly-Whittemore and Dan Blank for including me in the planning of such a fun and generous giveaway. They are the best.

And with so many of my own favorite reads!

http://laurenconrad.com/blog/2014/04/...

And I love the company-Sackett Street Writers instructor Ted Thompson (The Land of Steady Habits); fellow Lippincott Massie McQuilkin authors Roxane Gay (Untamed State) and Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs); and my Iowa classmate and book tour buddy, Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This).

http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/201...

“Fierro’s first novel captures the complexity of forging new friendships and redefining lives as contemporary parents. Her characters are meticulously drawn, the situations emotionally charged.
Readers, especially young parents, won’t be able to look away.”
- Booklist, April 2014 issue

Thanks to Brooklyn Magazine for including Cutting Teeth in their BROOKLYN 20 "Five Books by Brooklyn Authors That We Can’t Wait to Read"
And in such fine company--with Sackett Street instructors Catherine Lacey and Emma Straub, and novelists Rachel Cantor and Emily Gould.
Ladies!

http://www.bkmag.com/2014/03/04/five-...