-



Moto Girl
A novel by Jeffrey Kingman

Dust Flap:

Lindsey Rosales is a 12-year-old who is sometimes fearless but often anxious. At home she has a lot to fret about. Her mother has a grudge against her, and when a new stepfather comes into the picture she turns to him. He introduces her to off-road motorcycling, which she loves, so she feels indebted to him. But after he teaches her to ride he soon betrays her. Lindsey faces treachery in different ways from each parent and has no adult to turn to. Adding to this is the pressure she puts on herself to protect her younger sister. She finally suffers a breakdown. But she is ultimately able to see beyond herself, and it is her inner strength that saves her.

CHAPTER ONE
[excerpt]

From across the river the view of Mare Island is dominated by many antique cranes that used to lift the battleships and submarines into the dry dock. The Navy is gone now, the shipyard deserted. Save the cranes, they say, the people of Vallejo. (They don’t mean the birds, they mean the machines.) They want to prevent them from being removed because they’re used to seeing the huge old things poking up along the skyline when they walk along the pathway between the marina green and the Mare Island River. They’ve come to love the cranes’ unnatural beauty. But the cranes sit idle, their cables dangling uselessly, the empty operator compartments (built like small A-frame houses) reflecting sunlight off their little windows, 40 feet above the ground. The Navy pulled off the island many years ago and left it all as it was—equipment, historic industrial buildings, bomb shelters, elegant Victorian homes once inhabited by officers—as if they’d forgotten why they ever needed it. [more…]


A book trailer for Moto Girl

Two Mountains and Other Stories
by Jeffrey Kingman

THE APOLOGY

The box was too heavy. Hanna had packed it so full she couldn’t lift it more than a few inches. The stairs of the motel-style apartment building were made of concrete and iron and made a ringing sound every time she slammed the box down on the next higher step.
           Someone called out, “Oh! You can’t lift that, honey!”
           She looked up to the top of the steps to see who spoke with such a shrill voice. But with the sun in her eyes all she could see was the silhouette of a stocky woman wearing shorts and a tank top, standing with her hands on her hips, not coming down to help.
[more…]

DIARY OF A GHOST

…Sometimes I look at old pictures of myself from high school and that’s depressing too because I’ll compare how I looked then with how I look now. I guess I’m asking for it when I do that. When I pass by teenaged girls on the street I notice how radiant their skin is and I remember how mine used to look like that. I had quite a figure too, the kind of voluptuous hourglass figure that makes the boys drool. But when you get up into your 20s and start putting on the weight, it’s amazing how quickly that kind of figure just turns into a bunch of shapeless blubber. I still have some pictures of me and Spencer from senior year—he was the only real boyfriend I had in high school, and I convinced myself I was in love with him. But a lot happened before Spencer showed up. Earlier on I had a string of casual sex with various boys. That whole thing started sophomore year.
[more…]