In April 2018, Counterpoint employee Jenn Kovitz attended a reading with Jonathan Evison at The Book Catapult in San Diego, CA. During the q&a, Evison gushed about the singularity and grit of a self-published novel called "Jimmy James Blood" by a debut, self-taught, working-class writer Melissa Peterson, who was from the Pacific Northwest. Kovitz inquired about the manuscript after the reading, and Evison said he would reach out to Counterpoint editor at large, Harry Kirchner. Soon after, Kirchner circulated the manuscript of "Jimmy James Blood" to the Counterpoint staff. And it quickly received fierce and unanimous in-house support. There was only one change to be made: the novel was truly about the strong, unforgettable voice of the protagonist, Vera Violet. So Counterpoint, with Person's blessing, changed the novel's title, and to widely publish the book in an affordable, TPO format to best champion this incredible debut by a too-infrequently-heard American voiceVera Violet is a wonderful YA/new adult crossover option. It's also a book club book, a book that people can use as a catalyst for conversations about American history, western states' history, class, and women in the working class. There are ample opportunities to open up discussions about working-class feelings of powerlessness, lack of voice and space, and power dynamics of capitalism.Vera Violet doesn't coddle a reader and does leave many things unanswered, but to great emotional effectOne of the real strengths of this novel is the pace of the narration, which is both poetic at the sentence level and profound when considered more broadly. The reader is given clues to understanding the circumstances of Jimmy James's arrest throughout, but these details are indistinguishable from other, more mundane observations. For the disenfranchised, anything and everything--what someone wears, how they speak, what they drive, how they form relationships, what kind of family they come from--is likely to incriminate them at some point in some form. At some level, the details don't actually matter because they don't matter to the people in power. As such, the non-sequential order of disclosure, especially about relationships between characters, is a wonderfully effective narrative techniqueSet in the Pacific Northwest (lower Salish Sea/Puget Sound), Montana, and Missouri, Vera Violet will have wide-ranging regional resonance and connections. The author herself is from Shelton, WA, and has worked jobs as a logger, an inner-city youth counselor in Missouri, a trail crew member and wildlands firefighter in South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. She later began work in endangered species recovery in Washington and Montana, before receiving her Masters of Sciences from University of Montana. She is now a biologist and specializes in endangered species recovery and pollution monitoring.Don't miss author Melissa Anne Peterson's op-ed in The Missoulian immediately following Trump's election: "We are not going to make America great again. We have to make America great for the first time since early European businessmen came here with their economic model that replaced culture. Now is not the time to lie down in despair. Lay down your body in protest. Lay down virtues you will live by, lines you will not cross. Create the world that didn't exist."Author lives in Shelton, WALexile Measure: HL620LBookseller Praise for Vera Violet
"I devoured this book in two sittings. A gritty, poetic debut set in the rural Pacific Northwest-where jobs are few, drugs abound, and relationships are held together by tenuous threads. Melissa Anne Peterson has written a fantastic, unique debut-I hope this book gets the attention it deserves." -Julie Slavinsky, Warwick's (La Jolla, CA)
"In Melissa Anne Peterson's stark literary debut, her love of all that is wild shines through the dark
