Sharing today the blurbs for my forthcoming book, Terrestrial. I am so grateful to Joey Hedger, Emily Costa, and Drew Buxton for reading an early copy of the book and providing thoughtful blurbs. I’ve admired their work for years, so receiving these blurbs from them was everything I’d hoped for.

I wanted to create photos with the blurb text over them. It’s funny how in recent years I’ve gone from feeling on top of technology to feeling disconnected and aged, and really, unwilling to learn. I don’t know how to make videos and struggled with canva so I deleted it. I tried to paste the words over my own photos using an editing program on my computer but was frustrated with how it looked, my inability to move the text around correctly. So, I went old school and found some copies of Arizona Highways from 1997 (approximately when the book is set), picked photographs that looked most like the desert of the Phoenix area that I’m used to and where Terrestrial maybe takes place, and printed the text on my printer at home before cutting it out and laying it over the pages.

“Quirky, thoughtful, and heartfelt, a coming-of-age journey that might be enjoyed alongside the works of Kevin Wilson or Marie-Helene Bertino. Here, Eynon writes with poetic precision about contradictions: her characters are charming and awkward, vast and introspective. Her focus is on the lonely, the mundane and the spectacular. TERRESTRIAL is wildly human while exploring that which makes us alien to ourselves and each other.” – Joey Hedger, author of In the Line of a Hurricane and Deliver Thy Pigs

“In TERRESTRIAL, teenage Daisy is disappearing in so many ways; even in fantasy she imagines herself as a person who doesn’t “show excessive human need.” But in Suzy Eynon’s careful hands, these moments of intense, palpable loneliness are buoyed by hope and the possibility of meaningful connection. Eynon crafts Daisy’s rich inner world with such tenderness, and the backdrop of the alien desert is both haunting and gorgeous. Eynon masterfully plays with color and texture—pastels and creams, stucco and carpet, sweaty gum-sticky paper—and light—blinding oranges manipulated by miniblinds, or the mysterious ones in the night sky. TERRESTRIAL feels, itself, like a secret message, blinking out to anyone who has ever felt alone.” – Emily Costa, author of Girl on Girl and Until It Feels Right

“In this taut novella, we are transported to the sprawling Arizona suburbs with their faux adobe houses and dusty, cracked cul-de-sacs. In this barren landscape, we scramble along with Daisy as she searches for signs of life and connection, human or otherwise. TERRESTRIAL aches with the turmoil of adolescence.” – Drew Buxton, author of So Much Heart and Daytona Teddy Riggs

sources: photo 1) Arizona Highways, January 1997; photo 2) Arizona Highways, September 1997; photo 3) Arizona Highways, March 1997

xoxo