Late Bloomer

Prudence True Parker teaches a course called Advanced Personal Journey at a community college in Arizona, but her own personal journey is not really advancing. She’s divorced, debt-ridden, and starting to feel desperate, when she meets Digby Deeds (alias Mildred Crowley), the author of the wildly successful Savage Passion romance series, at her local library. When the dying Deeds offers Prudence the final forty plots of his popular series, her financial needs trump her literary aspirations, and she accepts. To her astonishment, her own life soon begins to outpace Passion’s fevered tales, and she finds herself in the midst of a plot involving psychics, a sexy young Comanche lover, Native American activists, medicine men, and even a few wolves. Quick-witted and laugh-out-loud funny, Late Bloomer follows Prue on her madcap journey, as she finds her real life surpassing the wildest flights of her imagination.

Melissa Pritchard is the author of two short story collections, The Instinct for Bliss and Spirit Seizures, and two novels, Phoenix and Selene of the Spirits. Pritchard was awarded a Pushcart Prize for “Funktionslust,” which appeared in The Paris Review. Her story “Salve Regina” was included in Prize Stories 2000: The O. Henry Awards. Among numerous other awards, she has received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University. She is Director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University and is on the faculty of Spalding University.