Blythe Woolston doesn’t remember learning how to read, but she suspects someone taught her as a ploy to keep her out of trouble in a slightly dangerous world full of bears and chainsaws and swift rivers. Today she reads books and writes the indexes that appear on their final pages. She lives in a wonder cupboard: one drawer is full of peppercorns, another holds the skull of a hoplitomeryx, another collects lint that might be useful in making bandages if it comes to that. The Freak Observer is her first novel, and it earned the William C. Morris award for best debut novel in 2011. She is also the author of Catch and Release, a novel. Follow her blog at www.blythewoolston.com.

 

Praise for The Freak Observer

“When I read for pleasure, I read for voice, and Loa’s voice is so true, so bone-dry funny, so enormously sad. . . . Brava Blythe Woolston for giving this girl’s voice to the world.”

 

—Kathe Koja, author of Headlong

“Blythe Woolston’s Loa Lindgren—like Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster or Sapphire’s Precious Jones—is marvelously tenacious, off-beat, and resilient. This is a startling and believable voice.”

 

—Julie Schumacher, author of Black Box

“The Freak Observer is at once tender and shocking, smart and edgy, emotionally rich and emotionally raw. Woolston writes with what seems like great ease yet with great originality.”

 

—Christina Meldrum, author of Madapple