“I’ve never read anything quite like HATTIE. The author draws the reader into Hattie’s singular world with deceptively simple but pitch-perfect language. There isn’t an extra word, sentence, character, or detail in this spare but deep rendering of a woman who has become separated from herself as a result of an abusive relationship. The story captures the awakening of Hattie’s soul, still pristine within her, as she moves from sorrow to acceptance to an appetite for life and experience that had been destroyed.

Many women will relate to HATTIE, not just women who have lived through abusive relationships because the quiet inner process of a woman claiming herself is the subject of this evocative novel, not the abuse. The ways a woman can become cut off from her creative core when her relationships or her work do not fit is something every woman will be able to share. The sentences are a pleasure to read, even as Hattie’s experience is flooded with the universal sorrow of loss. The soulful particularity of this woman and the way she seems to hesitantly share her inner life with the reader is exquisitely and flawlessly paced….”

Maris Nichols October 2014