Thrift Store Junkie

Everyone--or shall we say--everything has a story to tell. But what if the most interesting of stories belonged to every material possession you owned? In Thrift Store Junkie, you'll soon learn one valuable lesson: Even inanimate objects have a life of their own.

Josie Fontaine enjoys a certain pleasure others are hard pressed to understand. She is a "Type-A" Thrift Store Junkie and proud of it. Recently, her life-long love of things antique and second-hand has had a strange effect on her life and lands Josie in serious trouble. How was she supposed to know that a brutal, still unsolved murder involved one of her precious possessions? No one told her that lewd, unmentionable sex acts involved another one of her spectacular finds. Surely she would have avoided the beautiful item with strong ties to Chicago's most notorious mobsters.

So what's a woman to do? Josie tries to gain control of her life, but her actions sweep her husband out the door, anger her fellow Thrifters, and give her children cause to have her committed. Of all the nerve! Especially since it was Josie's flair for living rich and paying less which had, in many ways, benefited everyone else. Can Josie pull it together, make a clean start, and foil her family's plan to check her into the first available insane asylum?

Joanne Fondren, a poet, artist, an inventor, former thrift store junkie and resale shop manager for a non-for-profit hospital in Chicago, authored several children's books before the idea for Thrift Store Junkie came about. Born in Webster Grove, Missouri, but raised on the South Side of Chicago, she settled in the Kenwood area with her husband-Roy Fondren and three wonderful children (Gia, Shelley and Glen). Her vivid imagination, creative spirit and wacky inventions were always a delightful source of adventure and surprises for her friends and family.