Anna Beach

How to Fly with Rocks in Your Pocket Anna Beach

When a stagnant economy forces Addie to move back home following college, she is unwillingly immersed in the very traditions the surplus of the Clinton era might have allowed her to escape. Convinced that this pause in her life will lead to being stuck in a world of skirt suits, church services, and cutting children's sandwiches into adorable shapes, she struggles to redefine what she wants from life, all the while hating that she has to contemplate life at all. Everywhere she looks, it seems, those around her are ticking off marriage and babies as though on a neatly written to-do list, and she's still fighting with her mother about cleaning her room. As she struggles to assimilate to the community she hated as a child, she finds almost love (scourge of 20-somethings everywhere), employment (nothing to do with her degree), and a forgotten family secret that undermines the very foundation on which her life up to this point has been built.