A Small Crowd of Strangers

Joanna Rose is a longtime independent bookseller; she founded the Powell’s Books reading series and ran it for fifteen years. Little Miss Strange, her debut novel, earned critical praise and an award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. In today’s political climate, the topic of abortion has become a lightning rod for discussion; A Small Crowd of Strangers brings us inside how religion impacts one man’s feelings on his wife’s rights. Fans of the quirky women characters in Maria Semple’s fiction, particularly Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, will enjoy hapless and heartfelt librarian Pattianne Anthony. Joanna Rose’s ability to write relationships will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler and Ann Patchett. Family, at its core, is who you choose as your community, according to the lessons that Pattianne Anthony learns over the course of the book; her new friends on the edge of the world include a house full of adoptees, a priest in the process of losing his credentials, and a convenience store owner. Joanna Rose has a lifetime of literary connections in the Pacific Northwest in particular, including through her days as a bookseller, her work at Literary Arts, and her two-plus decades of teaching writers at the Pinewood Table. Positioning this title in fall 2020 may earn readers seeking long, delicious reads to escape the headlines.