Not All There — Michelle A. Gabow

A cafe pops up and disappears. Books fly off shelves. Conversations with the dead are more alive than old friendships. A woman with wings teaches flight. A Vietnamese lesbian manicurist/artist teaches the beauty of creativity. A Brazilian hairdresser/poet demonstrates the power of love to heal. All provide strange maps that lead Jewel to leave her affluent neighborhood and a thirty-five-year marriage to begin an unimaginable life.

What follows is a kind of odyssey of Jewel's circumstance as she journeys on a path of self-discovery, interacting with an variety of people, some relatively ordinary and others highly unconventional, as the mystery of becoming reveals itself.

Later, Nadine, a seventeen-year-old girl, through profound emails with her best friend, discovers a thread of magic in her depression, hope in her hopelessness, activism in “the terrible trump” era, teachers in mind-blowing places, and the gift of connection.