Bohemian Girl (Flyover Fiction)

Young Harriet s father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet s story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves.

A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda s new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather s iconic My Ántonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl s quest to discover who she is, Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda s prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.